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God and International Relations
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9781441138668_Pre_Final_txt_print.indd ii 2/22/2001 8:22:25 PM
God and International
Relations
Christian Theology and World Politics
Mika Luoma-aho
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Continuum International Publishing Group
80 Maiden Lane, New York, NY 10038
The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX
www.continuumbooks.com
© Mika Luoma-aho, 2012
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording,
or otherwise, without the permission of the publishers.
EISBN: 978-1-4411-2232-2
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalog record of this book is available from the Library of Congress.
Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India

Printed in the United States of America
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In appreciation of Professor Vilho Harle, for telling me how difficult it
would be.
The modern man is in general, even with the best will, unable to give
religious ideas a significance for culture and national character which
they deserve.
—Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 1904.
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Contents
Preface viii
1 Secularization of Theological Concepts 1

1.1 Symbolism and Beyond 6
1.2 The Two Political Worldviews 12
1.3 Body Politics-Tradition 20
1.4 Jesus Christ as Model 26
1.5 Appropriation of Secular Authority 33
1.6 Fear and Modern Order 42
2 Sacralization of International Relations 51
2.1 “States Are People Too!” 55
2.2 Personality, Morality, and Community 65
2.3 Anthropomorphism and Religion 75
2.4 Political Dogma of IR 87
3 Political Theology of the United Nations 94
3.1 The UN and Its Indispensable Foundations 96
3.2 Insisting on True Meaning 106
3.3 The Tao 119
3.4 Development and Guilt 130
4 Conclusion: States and Death 138
Bibliography 158
Index 167
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Preface
Let me begin this book by telling a brief story about what brought me to
write it in the first place. While this may not be a highly original way of
so doing, it does introduce the academic context where, when, and why
most of the central ideas of the present study were conceived.
I am not sure if I ever had much ambition to make the world a better
place when I pursued my studies in International Relations (hence-
forth IR). If there was, my altruism never let go of opportunism, hope
of an international career or something. Rather soon after getting a
grasp what it meant to study IR as a discipline of science, I began hav-
ing doubts about the enterprise. This was in the late 1990s: about the
time when “critical” and “dissident” appeared in titles of articles and
books with increasing frequency, and my mentors had no problems
introducing me to this kind of literature and encouraging me to think
things anew. Being a junior academic I was careful to let my doubts
loose at first, but becoming a postgraduate and finding a community of
like-minded colleagues helped me to hold on to them and see where
they were leading me.1 The question of the age was whether or not IR
was really a scientific discipline studying international politics from an
objective point of view, or rather a cunning way of doing international
politics and serving the purposes of power. This is still a relevant ques-
tion by the way.
To me there seemed to be two sorts of people involved in IR. The first
sort was the “serious” mainstream, who employed the tools of empirically
oriented social science to study the ongoings of world politics. These
were people who swallowed the political premises of the worldview of
the day and looked for ways to serve purposes of power within that world-
view.2 While most of them identified themselves realists of some descrip-
tion, students of “hard” facts and makers of “cold” conclusions, they
always seemed like idealists to me. What I mean by this is that they really
seemed to believe that world was not entirely unlike a colored map or a
billiard table, and that it made sense to make hypotheses and construct
theories on such metaphorical models. I could not get my head around
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Preface ix
the fact that some of them had math in their papers! It is my understand-
ing that most of the IR-community in the United States falls into this
category even today.
Then there was a more limited group of people, the critical “sideshow”
of serious IR, who had issues with most of what the mainstream held dear.
They were Marxists, criticals, dissidents, “posties,” call them what you
will. Most of them brought our own philosophies and worldviews with
them, but shared a political concern over the state-of-the-art of IR. They
slipped in a couple of panels under the door of the International Studies
Association’s annual conference every year—if there was a roundtable
on some topical issue, one of them was included just to make it look the
“criticals” had a part to play, whatever it was. I belonged to this group,
I suppose, as did most of my closest colleagues in Finland and in the
United Kingdom.
What bothered me most within the state-of-the-art was its proprietary
political subject. IRs was a “reality” where 200-or-so imaginary group
persons—states is what we call them—live in an imagined state of society.
The globe and humanity are, as it were, cut up among these beings and
delineated with imaginary lines. Though they have a highly developed
and exceedingly institutionalized symbolism at their disposal, no-one
has ever actually seen a state, witnessed the existence of a single one.
Yet it is absolutely necessary for every living person in the world today
to believe that states exist, and relate to the existence of their state in a
manner of obedience. With very few exceptions every child born on our
planet is subjected under the sovereignty of a state, depending either on
the location in which they were born or the nationality of their parents.
For many a child this is one of the most important decisions made on
their behalf—for some it may become a question of life or death. And
again: states are not really real, but imaginary entities we must believe to
see. I will write more about this in the following chapter.
I think it dawned on me when I was teaching one of my first politi-
cal theory tutorials: whatever IR is or is made to be, it is certainly much
closer to theological speculation than theoretical explanation. I main-
tain this view and this is basically what this book is about. It began to grow
from seeds of doubt planted by questions like these: What would happen
if everybody suddenly stopped believing that there existed a thing or
a being called a state? Would all the states in the world disappear that
instant? What would a world without states be like? These questions ques-
tioned the ontology of IR—International Relations—which is metaphysi-
cally married, so to speak, to the political entity of the state.
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x Preface
The turn of the century was a time when religion surfaced on IR’s
research agenda—to extend the metaphor: it popped up like a cork on
the surface. The violent break-up of the state of Yugoslavia contributed
to this, inasmuch it showed the world that religious faith could, given
chance, be just as potential political force as nationalist sentiment and
lead to yet another holocaust on the European “continent.” The chain
of events which began in the United States on September 11, 2001 and
continues today mainly outside America guarantees that religious funda-
mentalism will remain on the global political agenda for the foreseeable
future. The focus of my work is, however, neither on Jihad nor “War on
Terror.” I am interested in the world we identify as international relations,
the IR that studies this world, and their religiosity. This is to say: rather
than appropriating religion as a phenomenon of the world political or
assigning it as an object of study for IR, I will further problematize the sec-
ular image both this world and the discipline that studies it represent.
Since these “events,” IR has put in a lot of effort to come up with some-
thing (see e.g. Fox 2001; Fox and Sandler 2004; Thomas 2005; Hanson
2006) to explain the meaning and significance of religion in contem-
porary international relations. Despite, as Daniel Philpott argues in a
recent review of religion in the study of world politics, “it remains the
case that religion’s place in political science scholarship is vastly under-
proportioned to its place in headlines around the globe, and to scholar-
ship in political economy, security studies, international institutions, and
the like” (Philpott 2009, 184). While all this is a valuable body of work,
and I am aware there is more to come, the problem with most of the
current scholarship is the fact that it is striving to grasp religion in IR’s
terms: its ontological and epistemological presuppositions, its concepts
and theories. While all this can be an interesting and useful undertaking
to an extent, most of it presumes a secular worldview that does not have
a leg to stand on.
I will come back to this argument later on, but some of the questions
I will ask and attempt to answer in this book are: What if it is not the
Christianity or Islam IR needs to come to terms with, but itself as a reli-
gion and its own “religiosity”? If we accepted this analogy, recognized that
identity, what would it make our politicians and diplomats? Our political
scientists? Could a slight change of intellectual perspective completely
transform the way we look at and act in the world political? Or would it
make us ever more aware of the fatal shortcomings of this perspective?
These are crucial questions which have not yet been asked in the present
state-of-the-art.
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Preface xi
William E. Connolly touches the heart of the matter discussing the

problem of evil in his Identity/Difference. To live is to suffer—in theology
this frame of experience is known as the problem of evil and discussed
under theodicy. Before suffering becomes an evil there must be someone
or something responsible for it and the laying of the blame, so to speak,
is predominantly a political matter. Sometimes, not often in this day and
age, this politicization of suffering takes the form of a theistic discourse,
which locates the origin of evil on the negative side of, say, a Christian
worldview. A Christian can excuse most of the world’s hardship, violence,
and pain by Adam’s fall and mankind’s consequent rebellion against its
creator—the key here is patience, as all will be mended in good time.
Much more often responsibility for evil is located in non-Christian,
“secular” terms: there is much suffering in the world and someone here,
now is responsible. Even so, as Connolly notes, “some secular doctrines,
cutting off the god of theism at the head, retain too much of its body
in the ideals of identity, responsibility, and difference that they pursue”
(Connolly 1991, 2). This is to say that even though we like to think that
contemporary world politics is primarily a secular sphere of thought and
action, the political philosophies and theories underlying our contem-
porary political identities have been constructed “out of the debris of
broken theologies” (ibid.).
While in political theory search for the debris is well underway (see
e.g. Gentile 2006), very few scholars in IR have shown interest in look-
ing for theology in the state of their art. R. B. J. Walker did write in his
Inside/Outside that the theory of international relations built on the doc-
trine of state sovereignty “can be read as a very elegant specifically mod-
ern resolution of [. . .] philosophical problems that had once received
a more theological treatment” (Walker 1995, 320). According to Walker
(ibid., 314–15), IR is a theological discourse of “eternity” despite the
extent to which it has been and is being framed in the secular terms of
the Enlightenment. Another notable exception is Vendulka Kubalkova,
who brings the study of IR and religion together with her notion of
International Political Theology (IPT) that involves “the systematic study
of discourses and relations amongst them concerning world affairs that
search for—or claim to have found—a response, transcendental or secu-
lar, to the human need for meaning” (Kubalkova 2000, 676–7).
While I address this book to the field of academic IR, the premises
of my argument are in continental political theory. I see this work as a
sort of a pilgrimage. I was trained in IR and am most familiar with the
field, its history, and current developments. Over my short career as a
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xii Preface
social scientist I have worked in different universities, in Finland and

the United Kingdom, and done a fair share of interdisciplinary work, in
research as well as in teaching. Even though my experiences are limited
I have noticed a pattern I find, for a lack of a better term, curious: it
is always the IR-people that are most keen to maintain their disciplin-
ary identity and to guard the orthodoxy of its teaching. I can imagine
other reasons for such protectionism, but the one that comes first to
my mind is that more doubtful you are of the foundations of your art
less likely you want other people tampering with them. Thinking about
these things I heard Carl Schmitt’s argument on the secularization of
theological concepts—I had read his Politische Theologie while working
on my master’s thesis and never really got over the experience—nagging
for attention. Having said that I have to admit Schmitt himself did not
make much of the argument: there were no premises, just a conclusion
which declares that the most important political and juridical concepts
are secularized theological concepts. Even though it was little more than
a provocation, I could not help wondering: what if he was right?
IR is not a natural science or a branch of mathematics, and like all
the other social “sciences”—I will explain the apostrophes in the fol-
lowing paragraph—it has had to abandon the idea of a single, universal
rationality introduced to us by the Enlightenment philosophes. What we
have had to yield to in our IR, some of us more eagerly than others, is an
ingredient of social construction mediated by different and sometimes
even contradicting traditions of rationality. Since being established as
an academic discipline between the World Wars, and especially over
the last 20 years or so, IR has been very busy coming up with a variety
of modes to temper the ingredient of social construction and has often
come back to take another look at its ontological and epistemological
assumptions in its attempt to understand the world and comprehend-
ing its politics.
This book takes yet another look and attempts to make explicit that IR
demands a mode of inquiry that is closer to theology than it might want
to admit. I am very doubtful about IR as an enterprise and firmly believe
its foundations need a good tampering. If people somewhere have even
the slightest impression that this project of ours is serious science—seri-
ous as in labcoats, hadron colliders, and cure for cancer—then it is our
responsibility to be quite clear that what we do is far far from it. Before
coming up with one students of international politics need to take a
good look at some of their presuppositions and reflect on the politics of
studying international politics.
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Preface xiii
This book is also an attempt to consider—or indeed reconsider—

international politics with the premise that “the world” is not all there
is to it: that there is a God whose existence is relevant to the life of indi-
viduals, their communities, and the conditions they accommodate. I well
understand that this is not a conventional ontological position in IR and
writing a book carrying it along may raise some eyebrows and a number
of questions. Has not science disproved the existence of God? Has it
not proved that the human being is a species undergoing evolution and
not, as Christianity claims, created by God in his image? Is it not belief
in God, or “religion” itself, that largely explains many of the political
problems in the history of our world and at the heart of those of contem-
porary international politics?
The first of these questions is easy to answer—the last one will be
addressed in the concluding chapter. Science has not disproved God. This is
an idea that has been around for some centuries now, but most recently
been popularized by the so-called new atheists: Richard Dawkins, Daniel
Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens to name a few among
them. Their accomplishments are many, but among them is no empirical
evidence or scientific proof that falsifies the existence of God, but merely
highly profitable promotion of a system of belief of their own: that God
does not exist. These questions rest on a dichotomy of science apart from
religion: IR is a scientific discipline that studies facts and employs the
scientific method, whereas God is a belief we may or may not hold, but
one that lies outside the circle of science, being a subject of theological
speculation or something calling for a psychological or anthropological
explanation. This is, as the Oxford Professor of mathematics John C.
Lennox (2009, ch. 2) has shown, a simple category mistake: that science
is a thing that deals with reality and religion is something else altogether.
There is no inconsistency involved between doing committed and rigor-
ous science while simultaneously recognizing the fact that science can
not answer every kind of question, among them some of the deepest
questions human beings can ask: Why is there something rather than
nothing? Why did the universe come into being? What is the meaning of
human existence? What happens after we die?
I have accomplished what I set out to do with this book if the reader,
having given me a chance to present my case, comes to contemplate
three things:
1. The political potential of symbolism. We are surrounded by symbols of

a myriad kind: corporate logos on packages, traffic signs on the
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xiv Preface
roadside, application icons on our computer desktop, and so on.

There are also symbols we do not immediately recognize as such if we
do not come to think of them as symbols. Some symbols have politi-
cal functions and are of particular interest to those who study politics
as a phenomenon, but just as well to everyone else: since personal
became political one can no longer stand outside “the political.” States
are conglomerates of political symbols: they have flags, songs, repre-
sentatives, offices, buildings, soldiers, weapons, and ammo—almost
inexhaustible amount of “signs” that point to the state-hood of a par-
ticular national state. In the following chapter I will introduce a his-
torically important form of symbolism or a mode of representation
of the state, which is the state as a person with a body. Carl Schmitt’s
political theology provides an argument from which I will attempt to
locate the origins of the symbol, thread of it a historical tradition,
and also flesh out—pun intended—conceptual and theoretical sub-
stance to the idea of a corporeal, personal state. In the third chapter
I will extend this discussion to academic IR: its historical and current
debates. This will lead the reader to contemplate the following:
2. International relations is a religion and the state is its god. What this makes
IR-the-discipline is a theology of sorts, hiding under the canopy of
secular social science. This argument derives from Schmitt’s political
theology and secularization of theological symbolism (issues I discuss
in the following chapter) and a definition of religion as a systematic
anthropomorphism, that is application of humanlike models to non-
human phenomenon (which will be laid out in the third chapter).
From its interwar beginnings IR has elaborated on a political world-
view, recycling the classical symbols of the state, where the state is a
person with a body and international society is a community of such
political “people.” This is the state-of-the-art today and it is difficult, if
not impossible, for the academic as well as for the layman, to imagine
and communicate world politics in any other terms. This is exactly
what makes the political imagination of IR religious: that the “gods”
it worships—that is national states—are central in its worldview. The
problem with this is the following:
3. States do not hold within themselves the solution to the problems of contempo-
rary world politics, but instead are one of its problems in themselves. National
states were conceived as territorial solution to end religious war—so
the story goes—between some European states by instituting the prin-
ciple of cuius regio eius religio. This is a controversial historical narra-
tive, which I will come back to in the beginning of the third chapter,
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Preface xv
but the myth of the state as a “peacemaker” lingers on despite glar-

ing historical and ongoing evidence to the contrary. According to the
classical account of state sovereignty we have surrendered our right
of self-protection to our state on the condition that they protect us
at home and abroad. While there are states that do something to this
effect, there are many that do not, and an alarming number of states
that do anything but protect their (or anyone else’s) citizens. What
all this adds up to is an ethical paradox I will make discernible in the
fourth chapter, which is essentially a reading of the political theology
of the Millennium Declaration composed and signed under the aus-
pices of The United Nations in the year 2000.
I am not claiming originality with my argument(s). All of this and much

more has already been said, years ago. What this book does is bring ideas
together, give credit to the thinkers behind the ideas, articulate them
in terms of the IR-tradition, and make some connections in between.
The aim of the whole exercise is criticism pure and simple: criticism
of the state of academic IR. It is a call to humility before a world that
expects and often takes heed of our expert analysis and opinion. There
are many angles one can go about doing this, but the one I am taking
is that inspired by political theology, which begins from but is not limited
to Schmitt. What I will do in the inside chapters is make excursions into
some issues, which I think are central when we think about God and
IR. I have written my excursions with the literary form of commentary in
mind: presenting a contemporary idea or debate and working backwards
from there, attempting to illuminate what is often concealed or left in
the shadows in conventional discourse. This book is not a systematic
treatment of either of these conjunctions: God and IR or Christianity and
world politics. More exhaustive reflections on these issues are subjects of
future scholarship, but they may be able to tap into some of the connec-
tions made in this study.
Every author also has a personal context and I would like to make
explicit some details of mine that may be relevant to what follows. First:
I believe in the God of Christianity. Mine is a Lutheran congregation,
but I am not picky about creeds: C. S. Lewis’ “mere Christianity”3 is, at
the same time, particular and general enough description of my faith.
Secondly: I must apologize for my lack of expertise in other religions
apart from Christianity. This is the reason why the God addressed in
this book is that of Christianity and majority of theology discussed
belongs to the Reformed Christian tradition. Thirdly: I am Finnish
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xvi Preface
and often find myself using the national state of Finland as example
to illuminate something conceptual and/or theoretical. Reading my
examples I do not think the reader will find it too difficult to substitute
Finland with, say, any other member state of the European Union or,
with some modifications, any state in the “Western” world. I can imag-
ine it may be a lot trickier when one begins to think about the states
we “Westerners” have exported beyond the limits of this world of our
making.
* * *
It is well nigh impossible to name all those people who have contributed
to what follows. I have been helped out, in one way or another, by so
many colleagues in so many seminars and conferences over the last five
years or so it has taken me to work out what to do in this book. In col-
lecting and compiling the bits and pieces into the form of a monograph
over the last year or two I recognize my debt and express my gratitude to
Julian Reid and his Governing Life Globally—research project funded by
the Academy of Finland. I have benefited a lot from my discussions with
Ira Chernus, Vendulka Kubalkova, Aini Linjakumpu, Péter Losonczi,
Sergei Prozorov, Michael J. Shapiro, and Aakash Singh. Everyone else
who feel they have contributed to this book or the thoughts it attempts
to think out aloud, I offer this: I am deeply grateful and hope to be able
to pay, one day, my intellectual debts back in full.
And of course: deepest thanks to all my colleagues at the University
of Lapland and my wonderful family. I have been blessed with the job
of my dreams and a home I always love to return to at the end of the
day. I would also like to express gratitude to the thoracic surgeon Martti
Lepojarvi, cardiologist Heikki Miettinen, and everyone else who took
such good care of me when I was ill—without you there would not be a
book about God and International Relations.
Furthermore: the arguments that follow have been reviewed, revised,
and rejected by at least 20 anonymous referees over the years and I am
grateful to every single one for their benevolent effort to assess and
improve my work. I am especially thankful to the boost in motivation
given by one, whose feedback to my argument on IR being a religion
boiled down to this:
[T]he authors claim that this point has not been properly made in
IR “at least not in these terms”. If this is true, then I suggest that all
academic IR departments should be closed, the professors fired, the
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Preface xvii
students sent home and their tuition fees returned. Indeed, if this is
true then someone somewhere is not doing their job properly.
In my opinion this suggestion reflects an intellectual disposition before

which IR needs to take a few steps back, so to speak, and give some seri-
ous thought to its mission in the world before someone somewhere figures
us out and starts doing their job properly.
Notes
1
Professor David Campbell’s reading group at the University of Newcastle upon
Tyne made what in today’s parlance might be called a “cell” of critical thought,
and I was privileged to participate in its sessions during 1999–2002.
2
I use the term worldview as it has been defined by James W. Sire as “a set of pre-
suppositions (assumptions which may be true, partially true or entirely false)
which we hold (consciously or subconsciously, consistently or inconsistently)
about the basic makeup of our world” (Sire 2004a, 19). In the following chap-
ter I will introduce two political worldviews: one based on the relative order of
international relations and the other on the absolute order of God.
3
I essentially agree with Lewis’ assessment that “the best, perhaps the only, ser-
vice I could do for my unbelieving neighbours was to explain and defend the
belief that has become common to nearly all Christians at all times” (Lewis
2003, VIII).
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9781441138668_Pre_Final_txt_print.indd xviii 2/22/2001 8:22:26 PM
Chapter 1
Secularization of Theological Concepts
According to Oliver O’Donovan (1996, 4), the modern use of the term
political theology is generally held to begin with Carl Schmitt’s Politische
Theologie published in 1922.1 Schmitt is widely known these days; no rea-
son for me to go into his life and the controversy there.2 Over the last
few decades Schmitt-scholarship has grown massive as a new generation
of political and legal theorists have found to his work now widely avail-
able in translation. Schmitt’s significance to contemporary IR theory
was a topic of a recent anthology titled The International Thought of Carl
Schmitt (Odysseos and Petito 2007). Most of the attention there is paid on
Schmitt’s interwar The Concept of the Political and the postwar The Nomos of
the Earth; both highly relevant texts, of course, that address many of the
international issues of our neo-Schmittean moment. There are (at least)
two other texts the theorists of IR should, in my opinion, give a read: the
1922 Political Theology, and the 1970 Political Theology II.3 What I am offer-
ing here is a reading of Schmitt that aims to make political theology—
“the explicit attempt to relate discourse about God to the organization
of bodies in space time,” as it is defined by Peter Scott and William T.
Cavanaugh (2004) in their Companion to Political Theology—momentous
for IR today. The crux of my reading is the metaphysical image that, for
Schmitt, connects the political to the theological, making the presence
of the latter endemic in the former.
In Political Theology Schmitt declares that “[a]ll significant concepts of
the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not
only because of their historical development [. . .] but also because of
their systematic structure, the recognition of which is necessary for a
sociological consideration of these concepts” (Schmitt 1985, 36). Schmitt
does not provide us with a definitive list of concepts in this manner
secularized, only a few ideas—“the omnipotent God [has become] the
omnipotent lawgiver” and “the exception in jurisprudence is analogu-
ous to the miracle in theology” (Schmitt 1985, 36)—and some fleeting
9781441138668_Ch01_Final_txt_print.indd 1 2/22/2001 8:22:11 PM

2 God and International Relations
references to continental legal theory. What Schmitt is trying to make

out of these bits and pieces is an approach he calls the “sociology of
concepts,” the task of which is to trace legal and political ideas to their
metaphysical and theological roots and look for structural similarities
between conceptual systems across historical “epochs” (ibid., 45). What
he does with his sociology of concepts becomes a very interesting analysis
of the concept of state sovereignty, which, for Schmitt, shares a “spiritual
but at the same time substantial” identity with belief in God:
In the theory of the state of the seventeenth century, the monarch is

identified with God and has in the state a position exactly analogous
to that attributed to God in the Cartesian system of the world [. . .] A
continuous thread runs through the metaphysical, political and socio-
logical conceptions that postulate the sovereign as a personal unit and
primeval creator. (Schmitt 1985, 46–7)
The systematic structure inherited from Christian theology serves a

secular purpose, Schmitt clarifies in his 1923 essay Roman Catholicism
and Political Form, because “[n]o political system can survive even a gen-
eration with only naked techniques of holding power. To the political
belongs the idea, because there is no politics without authority and no
authority without an ethos of belief” (Schmitt 1996b, 17). The idea of
representation is, Schmitt argues, “completely governed by conceptions
of personal authority” (ibid.).
On this symbolic premise Schmitt elaborates his well-known definition
of the sovereign as the person who decides on the exception (Schmitt
1985, 5; see also Hirst 1987). There is an emphasis on the person here,
because Schmitt argues that “[t]o represent in an eminent sense can only
be done by a person, that is, not simply a ‘deputy’ but an authoritative per-
son or an idea which, if represented, also becomes personified” (Schmitt
1996b, 21). Representation invests the representative person with dignity,
because “the representative of a noble value cannot be without value”
(ibid.). God, “the people” in democratic ideology, or abstract ideas like
freedom and equality can all constitute a representation. Representation
is, thus, a discourse, but it is not a political discourse in the Schmittean
sense: one that aims to make the friend/enemy distinction. As he (Schmitt
2008a, 239) teaches in his 1928 Constitutional Theory, representative dis-
course does not divide but unites a people politically. Representation takes
place in the public sphere and renders concrete the spiritual principle
of political existence: “to make an invisible being visible and present

Secularization of Theological Concepts 3
through a publicly present one” and conceiving “a type of being that is

higher, further enhanced, and more intense in comparison to the natural
existence of some human group living together” (ibid., 243).
Schmitt’s conception of sovereignty is Hobbesian through and through.4
The extent to which he was influenced by Thomas Hobbes’ thought
and his symbolism is revealed in Schmitt’s 1938 essay on Leviathan. “In
the long history of political theories,” Schmitt (1996a, 5) writes, “a his-
tory exceedingly rich in colorful images and symbols, icons and idols,
paradigms and phantasms, emblems and allegories, this leviathan is the
strongest and most powerful image.” Schmitt backs his argument with an
impressive history of an idea behind the copper-plate engraving on the
title page of the 1651 English edition of Leviathan: “a gigantic man, com-
posed of innumerable midgets, holding in his right hand a sword and
in the left one a crosier, guarding a peaceful city” (Schmitt 1996a, 18).
Above the figure of the gigantic man a biblical motto: “On earth there is
not his like, a creature without fear” (Job 41.33 ESV).
The starting point of Hobbes’ construction of the state is fear: state of
nature drives anguished individuals to come together, rally behind the
strongest party. A sovereign is a representative person or a corporation
that comes into being by way of a covenant between individuals:
I authorise and give up my right of governing myself to this man, or

to this assembly of men, on this condition; that thou give up, thy right
to him, and authorise all his actions in like manner. This done, the
multitude so united in one person is called a commonwealth; in Latin,
CIVITAS. This is the generation of that great leviathan, or rather, to
speak more reverently, of that mortal god to which we owe, under the
immortal God, our peace and defence. For by this authority, given him
by every particular man in the Commonwealth, he hath the use of so
much power and strength conferred on him that, by terror thereof, he
is enabled to form the wills of them all, to peace at home, and mutual
aid against their enemies abroad. (Hobbes 1996, pt. 2, ch. xviii, capi-
tals in original)
The crux of this covenant is its personalism: that it is made with “this man”
or “this assembly of men.” (Let us keep the term covenant in mind,
because I will return to it in Chapter 4.) Schmitt argues that when we
give up our right to govern ourselves it is absolutely necessary that we
give it to someone—a person in the actual or corporeal sense of the
term—who then uses it for our protection at home and abroad. What

Schmitt in fact does is decontextualize sovereign subjectivity as it was

imagined by Hobbes:
Whether God alone is sovereign, that is, the one who acts as his
acknowledged representative on earth, or the emperor, or prince, or
the people, meaning those who identify themselves directly with the
people, the question is always aimed at the subject of sovereignty, at
the application of the concept to a concrete situation[:] Who is sup-
posed to have unlimited power? (Schmitt 1985, 10)
This is concrete sovereignty: the highest, legally independent, underived

power that radiates from an authoritative person, or something authori-
tative personified, within a state, in every state. What Schmitt refuses to
accept is any attempt to substitute a person with something else, a legal
abstraction or a political theory perhaps. We need someone, a “god”
mortal or immortal, to assume authority over matters which are not dic-
tated by law. Abstractions and theories can do little against the enemy
(Schmitt 1985, 16–35).
Schmitt’s vitriol is in self-defense. The second essay in Political Theology
is a defense of concrete sovereignty against precisely such theories and
abstractions. Schmitt singles out “association theory” and monistic juris-
prudence as the embodiments of his antithesis, but what he is criticizing
is the early-twentieth-century liberal notion of a modern state. Most of
Schmitt’s polemic is set against Hugo Krabbe and Hans Kelsen. In his
The Modern Idea of the State Krabbe absolutely opposed the doctrine of
sovereignty; the idea that political authority is a person standing outside
the law. Krabbe argued that the term belonged to a political theory of
the absolutist era, whereas in the Rechtsstaat positive law has superseded
the sovereign claim to unconditional obedience. For Krabbe the author-
ity of the state was nothing other than the impersonal authority of the
law: “[h]ence there is only one ruling power, the power of law” (Krabbe
1922, 2). This was the revelation of the modern idea of the state:
We no longer live under the dominion of persons, either natural per-

sons or fictitious legal persons, but under the dominion of norms, of
spiritual forces. [. . .] The old foundation which heretofore had mainly
supported the life of the community, the personal authority of the sov-
ereign, has been compelled to give place (or at least is more and more
giving place) to another foundation which is derived from the spiritual
nature of mankind. [. . .] These forces rule in the strictest sense of the

word. Obedience can be freely rendered to these forces, for the very
reason that they do proceed from the spiritual nature of mankind.
(Krabbe 1922, 8–9)
Unfortunately, for Krabbe I suppose, political theory had not kept up

with the modern idea of the state, but persistently clung to the “old” idea
of sovereignty. It was difficult to dissociate from the conception of power
that was supported by centuries of tradition and a highly elaborate sym-
bolism adapted to this conception.
This is also what Hans Kelsen’s “pure jurisprudence” was about:
de-personalization of the concept of sovereignty. Kelsen identified the
state with its legal order and deprived sovereignty of all relevancy to any
person, physical or corporate. State was a normative order, and the idea
of a person-hood of the state could only symbolize this order, if it was
needed at all. Indeed, after World War II, Kelsen relegated the idea to
the historical and ideological domain of totalitarianism:
Political absolutism [has] a political theory at its disposal which

describes the state as an absolute entity existing independently of its
subjects. According to this theory, the state is not merely a group of
individuals; it is more than the sum-total of its subjects. It is a collec-
tive, and that means here a super-individual, body which is even more
real than its members, a mystic organism and as such a supreme and
super-human authority, whose visible representative or incarnation is
the ruler, whether he be called the monarch, Fuhrer or Generalissimo.
It is the concept of sovereignty serving the purpose of this deification
of the state which implies the worship of the ruler as a god-like being.
(Kelsen 1948, 909–10)
Kelsen agreed with Schmitt in that the image of the person-hood of the
state had a religious origin, but argued that this image had antiquated
along with medieval theology and that democratic legalism no longer
needed deification.
Here is the chasm between Kelsen and Schmitt. For Schmitt the key
for understanding Hobbes’ concrete sovereignty is in the biblical ori-
gin of the Leviathan metaphor: that it illustrates, by means of Job’s sea
monster, the strongest temporal power to keep all the weaker ones in
check (Schmitt 1996a, 17–26). To be sovereign is to be deus mortalis: a
“Mortal God, to which we owe under the Immortal God, our peace and
defence” (Hobbes 1996, pt. 2, ch. xvii, emphasis in original). This was

a logical position to take, for Hobbes as it was for Schmitt, because it

is premised on an ontology of violence: without a sovereign authority,
absolutely alone and without rival, there will be violence and death. This
is what William T. Cavanaugh calls the soteriology of the state: “It is cold
fear and need for security, the foundation of both religion and the social
contract, that drives humans from their nasty and brutish circumstances
and into the arms of Leviathan” (Cavanaugh 2002, 36).
1.1 Symbolism and Beyond
In the previous section I discussed a debate concerning the possibility

of containing the sovereignty of the state in the symbol of the person.
Schmitt argued such a representation was indeed necessary, Kelsen and
others were critical. Why such an argument over an image, a metaphor?
Is it not more important what the state does than how it appears, what
we make it look like? Every practitioner of academic IR who has done
semiotic work is at least aware of an attitude, which has a tendency to
make itself explicit every now and then, according to which studying
international relations from signs—that is language and other forms of
symbolism—is of secondary importance to the study the material reality
signified by these signs: something “harder,” empirically or otherwise.
Such an attitude brushes aside at least a century of semiotic anthropol-
ogy. According to Umberto Eco culture is essentially signification and
communication: “humanity and society exist only when communicative
and significative relationships are established” (Eco 1979, 22). Eco’s A
Theory of Semiotics argued that the whole of culture should be studied
as communicative phenomenon based on signification systems: “[t]his
means that not only can culture be studied in this way but [. . .] only by
studying it in this way can certain of its fundamental mechanisms be clar-
ified” (ibid.). Peter L. Berger, the sociologist of knowledge, wrote in his
The Sacred Canopy that as individuals we make sense of reality and them-
selves as part of that reality in conversation with others, and maintaining
this conversation is one of the most important imperatives of social order
(see also Berger and Luckmann 1967). For Berger the human being
is incapable of conceiving their experience in a meaningful way unless
such a conception is transmitted to him by means of social processes:
The individual is socialized to be a designated person and to inhabit

a designated world. Subjective identity and subjective reality are

produced in the same dialectic [. . .] between the individual and those

significant others who are in charge of his socialization. (Berger 1990,
16, emphasis in original)
This socialization is an ordering of experience, and a meaningful order

socially constructed Berger calls nomos—this is an interesting and useful
term, and I will pick it up later in this chapter. Alasdair MacIntyre’s After
Virtue cast further doubts over the attempt to do social science from a
strictly materialist perspective. For MacIntyre, being human is essentially
a narrative existence: “man in his actions is and practice, as well as in his
fictions, essentially a storytelling animal” (MacIntyre 2007, 216). Human
beings are semiotic creatures by nature: we all live out our lives in narra-
tives and likewise narrative is the form we understand the lives of others.
Accepting this as premise makes it impossible to study the behavior of
human beings without taking account their intentions, beliefs, and the
settings in which they “behave.” “And what would be utterly doomed to
failure,” MacIntyre writes, “would be the project of a science of, say, politi-
cal behaviour, detached from a study of intentions, beliefs and settings”
(ibid., 208, emphasis in original).
I hope this suffices to carry my inquiry into political symbolism beyond
reasonable epistemological doubt. I am now going to proceed and
define what I mean by the term symbol. My reading of the meaning and
use of the term owes a good deal to Paul Tillich’s existential philosophy,
Peter L. Berger’s and Thomas Luckmann’s sociology of knowledge, Paul
Ricoeur’s hermeneutics, and Sallie McFague’s theology.5
Tillich defines symbols as signs that point beyond themselves to some-
thing else, but the fundamental difference between symbols and signs is
that the latter do not participate in the reality and power of that which
they point: “[s]ymbols, although they are not the same as that which
they symbolize, participate in its meaning and power” (Tillich 1999, 45).
Religious and poetic languages are typically symbolic languages, words
like “Christ” and “God” symbols. There are also nonlinguistic symbols
like a flag or a crucifix. According to Tillich symbolism opens up levels of
reality which otherwise are hidden and cannot be grasped in any other
way.6 Religious symbolism does the same thing essentially, but the reality
opened by its symbols reaches deeper in the human soul:
We can call this the depth dimension of reality itself, the dimension of
reality which is the ground of every other dimension and every other
depth, and which therefore, is not one level beside the others but is the

fundamental level, the level below all other levels, the level of being
itself, or the ultimate power of being. (Tillich 1999, 49)
All other symbols either stand for things that also have an idealized
“nonsymbolic” existence, like a flag can symbolize a state, or they are
forms giving expression to things that have no empirical existence
except in its symbols. This is to say that the nonreligious symbol points
to levels of reality which are limited or conditioned, the religious sym-
bol points to the absolutely unconditioned: the properly basic level of
reality presupposed by all other levels (Rowe 1968, 132). Discussing the
distinction between religious and other symbols Tillich laments that the
first step toward secularization was made by religion itself when theo-
logians began to explain symbols standing for the ultimate in literal
terms: when they brought ideas of God from the “depths” to the reality
of everyday experience. “If the symbol of creation which points to the
divine ground of everything is transferred to the horizontal plane,” he
argues, “it becomes a story of events in a removed past for which there
is no evidence, but which contradicts every piece of scientific evidence”
(Tillich 1999, 4).
Berger and Luckmann (1967, 43–6) also write about the transcending
capacity of symbolic language, identifying it with an ability to bridge dif-
ferent zones of everyday life and “span discrete spheres of reality” (ibid.,
40). On the symbolic level
linguistic signification attains the maximum detachment from the

“here and now” of everyday life, and language soars into regions that
are not only de facto but a priori unavailable to everyday experience.
Language now constructs immense edifices of symbolic representa-
tions that appear to tower over the reality of everyday life like gigan-
tic presences from another world. (Berger and Luckmann 1967, 40,
emphasis in original)
Religion, philosophy, art, and science, Berger and Luckmann argue, are
historically speaking the most important symbolic systems, but symbol-
ism of course extends these fields. Symbols that are conceived as high
“above” from here and now can “descend” and over time made into
objectively real elements of our day-to-day experiences: “In this manner,
symbolism and symbolic language become essential constituents of the
reality of everyday life and of the commonsense apprehension of this
reality” (Berger and Luckmann 1967, 40–1).

In his The Symbolism of Evil Ricoeur understands symbol as a gathering

together at a single point a mass of significations which, before giving
rise to thought, gives rise to speech. Symbolism is fundamental to phi-
losophy as it points to the original unity between humanity and being:
Man first reads the sacred on the world, on some elements or aspects
of the world, on the heavens, on the sun and moon, on the waters and
vegetation. Spoken symbolism thus refers back to manifestations of
the sacred, to hierophanies, where the sacred is shown in a fragment
of the cosmos, which, in return, loses its concrete limits, gets charged
with innumerable meanings, integrates and unifies the greatest pos-
sible number of the sectors of anthropocosmic experience. (Ricoeur
1969, 10–1, emphasis in original)
According to Ricoeur symbols are signs that aim at something beyond

themselves and stand for that something. Contrary to conventional signs,
which say only what they want to say in positing the thing(s) they signify,
symbols are “opaque” in that the first, obvious meaning itself points to
a second meaning which is not otherwise given. It is by “living in” the
obvious meaning one is led by it beyond itself. Unlike a comparison, a
symbol is “movement of the primary meaning which makes us partici-
pate in the latent meaning and thus assimilates us to what is symbolized
without our being able to master the similitude intellectually” (Ricoeur
1969, 16). Also unlike allegories, symbols do not attempt to make their
meaning fully transparent, but present it “in the opaque transparency
of an enigma and not by translation” (ibid.). Metaphorical language is
not, however, a mere ingredient in language, because each spoken or
written word is in itself a metaphor and language as a whole is a system
of metaphors that composes the understanding we have of our world
(Beer 2001, 94–5).
Perhaps we need an example to make this “discernible.” Take para-
dise, Garden of Eden: this is a place certainly enigmatic enough to the
post-foundational mind. We remember, however, that Genesis conceives
and locates the place as follows:
And the LORD God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and there
he put the man whom he had formed. And out of the ground the
LORD God made to spring up every tree that is pleasant to the sight
and good for food. The tree of life was in the midst of the garden, and
the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. A river flowed out of Eden

to water the garden, and there it divided and became four rivers. The
name of the first is the Pishon. It is the one that flowed around the
whole land of Havilah, where there is gold. And the gold of that land
is good; bdellium and onyx stone are there. The name of the second
river is the Gihon. It is the one that flowed around the whole land of
Cush. And the name of the third river is the Tigris, which flows east of
Assyria. And the fourth river is the Euphrates. (Gen. 2.8-14)
Eden is an exceedingly magnificent location created by God himself: a

land where rivers come together, trees are full of fruit, precious minerals
aplenty. What we have here is language of fantasy. By reading Genesis
we can not establish for a fact that the place actually existed, and if it
did, that it was as described. We have not seen the place and these are
merely pictures we can choose to believe or doubt. But can you speak
of a place like paradise except in pictures? In his theological exposition
of the Genesis the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes that
pictures like this are not lies ridiculing facts of history or geography, but
rather kind of signals that enable a meaning of a different kind to shine
through. To be sure pictures will vary: paradise is a different place for
a child than it is for an adult, for a man and a woman. But, Bonhoeffer
argues, “[o]ne way or another, however, they remain true, to the extent
that human speech and even speech about abstract ideas can remain
true at all” (Bonhoeffer 2004, 81).
Take another example: the state of Finland. That most certainly exists,
yes? Have you seen it? There is an agreement on a certain territory
belonging to it, we have a picture of it drawn on a map, it has a flag
and lots of other “Finnish” things, and of course there are more than a
5 million Finns. That is: we have many a thing that symbolizes Finland,
filled to the brim with meaning, but do we have Finland? These are all
(more or less) tangible pictures of Finland, but none of them exhaus-
tively express what Finland is.
Say it was somehow possible to “untie” all the symbols, words, and pic-
tures of Finland: set free everything that signifies the reality of that state
accumulated since 1917 (or some time before that) up to this day. This
would mean letting the Finnish flag fly away with the wind, but not only
that: language, history, political institutions, legal system, armed forces
&c. all have symbolic functions and would no longer be peculiarly Finnish.
What would be left after getting rid of the whole body of Finnish symbol-
ism? There would be flagpoles planted in backyards, people speaking a

Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
The Project Gutenberg eBook of The horror
expert
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States
and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
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ebook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the
United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where
you are located before using this eBook.
Title: The horror expert
Author: Frank Belknap Long
Illustrator: Robert Schulz
Release date: August 30, 2023 [eBook #71521]
Language: English
Original publication: New York, NY: Belmont Productions, Inc, 1961
Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed

Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was
produced from images made available by the HathiTrust
Digital Library.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE

HORROR EXPERT ***
THE HORROR EXPERT
A New Novel by
Frank Long
BELMONT BOOKS
NEW YORK CITY
THE HORROR EXPERT is an original full-length novel

published by special arrangement with the author.
BELMONT BOOKS
First Printing December 1961
© 1961 Belmont Productions, Inc., all rights reserved
BELMONT BOOKS
published by
Belmont Productions, Inc.
66 Leonard Street, New York 13, N. Y.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
TWISTED
"She had a secret library of psychological case histories, featuring
pathological and brutal departures from normalcy in the area of sex.
She never missed a weird movie. Terror in any form excited her
physically...."
Helen Lathrup had a curious twist in her imagination ... a twist that
needed an outlet in real life. Close friends found themselves drawn
into a nightmare world of terror and guilt. Finally one violent act
triggered an explosion.
"She's the kind of woman who can make a man hate and despise
himself—and hate her even more for making him feel that way. I'm
not the only one she's put a knife into. Do you hear what I'm saying,
do you understand? I'm not her first victim. There were others before
me, so many she's probably lost count. But she'll do it once too
often. She'll insert the blade so skillfully that at first Number Fifteen
or Number Twenty-two won't feel any pain at all. Just a warm
gratefulness, an intoxicating sort of happiness. Then she'll slowly
start twisting the blade back and forth ... back and forth ... until the
poor devil has been tormented beyond endurance. He'll either wrap
a nylon stocking around her beautiful white throat or something
worse, something even uglier, will happen to her. I know exactly how
her mind works, I know every one of her tricks. I keep seeing her in a
strapless evening gown, with that slow, careful smile on her lips.
She's very careful about how she smiles when she has the knife
well-sharpened. It's a wanton smile, but much too ladylike and
refined to give her the look of a bar pickup or a hip-swinging tramp.
Brains and beauty, delicacy of perception, sophistication, grace. But
if she were lying in a coffin just how many of those qualities do you
think she'd still possess? Not many, wouldn't you say? Not even her
beauty ... if someone with a gun took careful aim and made a target
of her face."
The voice did not rise above a whisper, but there was cold malice
and bitterness in it, and something even more sinister that seemed
to be clamoring for release. It was just one of many millions of
voices, cordial or angry or completely matter-of-fact that came and
went in the busy conversational life of New York City. It might have
come from almost anywhere—a quickly lifted and re-cradled
telephone receiver perhaps, or from a recording on tape or from the
recklessly confidential lips of a man or woman seated in a crowded
bus, or walking along the street in the company of a close friend.
It might even have been addressed to no one in particular—an angry
outburst prompted by some mentally unbalanced person's
compulsive need to bare secret, brutally uninhibited thoughts.
But whatever its precise nature and from whatever source arising, it
was quickly lost and swallowed up in the vast conversational hum of
a city that was no stranger to startling statements and ugly threats.
Chapter I
The heat had been oppressive all night, but now the streets were
glistening, washed clean by rain, and there was a holiday freshness
in the air. The rain had stopped, but the taxi moving slowly down
Fifth Avenue in the wake of the storm was still wet and gleaming and
had the same washed-clean look.
The woman who sat staring out of the cab window at the cluster of
pedestrians waiting to cross 42nd Street had dressed at leisure,
eaten a light breakfast of orange juice, toast and three-minute eggs,
glanced briefly at the morning headlines, and descended in a private
elevator through a tall, gray house in the East Eighties without
manifesting the slightest outward strain.
But once in the taxi a fierce impatience had taken possession of her
—an impatience which far exceeded that of the pedestrians who
were waiting for the Don't Walk light to vanish at New York's most
crowded intersection.
Helen Lathrup had been chain-smoking and was now on her fourth
cigarette. It was burning the tips of her fingers a little but she seemed
not to care about the pain. She inhaled deeply, blew a cloud of
smoke from her nostrils and fanned it away with her hand, her lips
tightly compressed.
The hurry and bustle of shopgirls, clerks and early morning shoppers
annoyed and angered her. She had no sympathy at all with the look
of keen anticipation on many of the faces, for she was not in a
holiday mood.
There was no reason why she should be, she told herself with
considerable bitterness. The long Fourth of July week-end had not
yet begun—was, in fact, a full day away. An interminable Friday
stretched out before her, with important work piling up, work
neglected or improperly handled, and there was no one except
herself she could depend on to see that no mistakes were made.
It wasn't just the avoidance of costly stupidities she had to concern
herself with. There were a hundred minor annoyances awaiting her.
A grinning fool like Macklin, with his head in the clouds, could joke
about them and call them "office headaches." But she knew that they
could be serious, like grains of sand clogging the moving parts of a
complex and very expensive machine.
She leaned forward and spoke sharply to the driver, gripping one
nylon-sheathed knee so tightly that her knuckles showed white.
"What's holding you up? You waited too long at the last light, and
now we're being stopped again."
"Sorry, lady," the driver said, without turning his head. "That's the
way it is sometimes."
She leaned back, whispering under her breath: "Stupid man!"
"What did you say, lady?"
"Not a goddam thing."
Her mood did not improve as the taxi neared its destination, turning
east a few blocks north of Washington Square and then west again,
slowing down amidst a crosstown traffic snarl that seemed
outrageous to her and entirely the fault of the police. She was
lighting her sixth cigarette when the cab drew to the curb before a
twenty-story office building with an impressive façade of gleaming
white stone.
Ten minutes later Helen Lathrup sat alone in the most private of
private offices, a sanctuary where interruptions were infrequent even
when permitted, and intrusion under other circumstances absolutely
forbidden.
The office was in all respects in harmony with the prestige and
dignity of an editorial director of a nationally famous group of
magazines. Large and paneled in oak, its main furnishings consisted
of a massive oak desk, three chairs, one facing the desk, and a
circular table with a glass top and nothing on it at all.
If the décor was a little on the severe side and there was something
distinctly unbending about the woman who now sat facing the door
upon which, in gilt lettering, her name was inscribed, a visitor
entering the office for the first time would not have felt ill at ease.
Not, at any rate, if that visitor happened to be a man. Great feminine
beauty, however much it may be combined with qualities intimidating
to the male, is seldom intimidating at first glance. The glow, the
warmth, the splendor of it is too instant and overwhelming. Even
when it is allied with a harsh coldness which is quick to manifest
itself, it is so very easy to believe that a miracle will occur, that secret
delights are in store for any man bold enough to make light of
obstacles which are certain to prove transitory ... if just the right
technique is applied.
Though it is impossible to judge beauty by any rigid set of rules,
though tastes may differ and the experts disagree, it is doubtful if
one man in a hundred would have failed to be dazzled by the
absolute perfection of Helen Lathrup's face and figure. She had only
to cross a room, walking slowly and with no accentuation of
movements which were as natural to her as breathing, to transport
men into another world, where the sun was brighter, the peaks
higher, and unimaginable delights awaited them.
Even in moments when she herself felt empty and drained,
completely unstirred by the close presence of a man, there were few
of her suitors who would not have stopped before a door marked
"Danger—Enter at Your Peril," pressed a button, and walked into a
room as chill and depressing as the gas chamber at San Quentin,
solely for the pleasure of keeping a dinner date with her.
By whatever yardstick her friends or enemies might choose to judge
her by, Helen Lathrup remained what she was—an extraordinary
woman. And by the same token, extraordinary in her profession, with
accomplishments which inspired admiration and respect, however
grudgingly accorded.
There was another aspect of Helen Lathrup's personality which she
seldom talked about and which made her unusual in a quite different
way.
At times, her thoughts would take a very morbid turn; she would fall
into restless brooding and seek out a kind of diversion which most
people looked upon as pleasurable only when it remained
completely in the realm of entertainment. To her, it was something
more.
The darkly sinister and terrifying in literature and art disturbed and
fascinated her. She had long been a reader of supernatural horror
stories and there were a dozen writers in that chilling branch of
literature to whose work she returned again and again. Edgar Allan
Poe, Ambrose Bierce, M. R. James and H. P. Lovecraft—all supreme
masters in the art of evoking terror—occupied an entire shelf in her
library, along with scholarly studies of witchcraft, medieval
demonology and Satanism.
Another shelf was entirely taken up with modern psychological
studies of crime in its more pathological and gruesome aspects,
including those often brutal departures from normalcy in the sphere
of sex that appall even the most sophisticated minds.
She never missed an outstanding screen production of a terrifying
nature. Mystery films which dealt with criminal violence in a somber
setting never failed to excite her. The psychopathic young killer,
haunted, desperate, self-tormented and guilt-ridden, had a strange
fascination for her, whether in books or on the screen, and she
experienced a pleasure she would not have cared to discuss as she
watched the net closing in, the noose swinging nearer ... and then
darkness and despair and the terrible finality of death itself.
But always there was a price which had to be paid. With the ending
of the picture or the closing of the book a reaction would set in, and
she would sit shivering, fearful, visualizing herself, not in the role of
the furtive, tormented slayer—even when that slayer was a woman—
but as the victim.
The victim of the very violence she had welcomed and embraced,
with wildly beating heart, when she had thought of it as happening to
someone else.
She could not have explained this aberration even to herself, and the
impulse to succumb to it, to make herself agonizingly vulnerable by
seeking out a certain movie or a certain book, would come upon her
only at times.
This Friday morning, however, Helen Lathrup was in an entirely
different mood.
She was almost trembling now in her impatience to get on with the
day's work, to make every minute count, precisely as she had
determined to do on the long, frustrating ride from her home to the
office.
She picked up the mail which lay before her, looked through it, and
leaned toward the intercom to summon her secretary. The door of
the office opened then, and someone she was not expecting to see
until later in the morning, someone whose presence at that exact
moment was distasteful to her, stared at her unsmilingly and closed
the door again very firmly by backing up against it.
The intruder made no attempt to apologize for the outrageousness of
such behavior—made no effort, in fact, to speak at all.
The gun in the intruder's hand was long-barreled, black and ugly-
looking and capped by a silencer. It was pointed directly at her. The
intruder's eyes were half-lidded, but when the light in the room
shifted a little the lids went up, disclosing a cold rage and a firmness
of purpose that told Helen Lathrup at once that she was in the
deadliest kind of danger.
It was not in her nature to remain immobile when a threat confronted
her. Neither was it in her nature to remain silent.
She rose slowly, keeping her eyes trained on the intruder's face,
displaying no visible trace of fear. Her voice, when she spoke, was
coldly contemptuous and tinged with anger.
"Why are you pointing that gun at me?" she demanded. "What do
you want? I'm not afraid of you."
Still without uttering a word the intruder grimaced vindictively, took a
slow step forwards, raised the gun a little and shot Helen Lathrup
through the head.
The gun's recoil was violent, the report quite loud. A silenced gun is
not silent. It can be heard from a considerable distance. But the
intruder appeared either willing to accept that risk, or had discounted
it in advance as of no great importance.
Helen Lathrup did not cry out, and the impact of the bullet did not
hurl her backwards, for the bullet passed completely through her
head and the weapon had been fired at no more than medium-close
range.
For an instant the tip of her tongue darted along the quivering,
scarlet gash of her mouth, but the rest of her face remained
expressionless. Her eyes had gone completely blank. It was as if
tiny, weighted curtains, iris-colored, had dropped across her pupils,
obliterating their gleam, making both eyes look opaque.
For five full seconds she remained in an upright position behind the
desk, her back held rigid. A barely perceptible quivering of her
shoulders and a spasmodic twitching of her right hand gave her the
look, if only for an instant, of a strong-willed woman shaken by a fit of
ungovernable rage and still capable of commanding the intruder to
depart.
Then her shoulders sagged and she shuddered convulsively and fell
forward across the desk, her head striking the desktop with such
force that it sent an ashtray crashing to the floor. An explosive sound
came out of her mouth, and her body jerked and quivered again, but
less violently, and after that she did not move.
The door opened and closed, with a barely audible click.
Chapter II
The clicking of typewriters in two of the offices almost drowned out
the sound of the shot. It was just a faint zing, with a released-
pressure kind of vibrancy about it. A ping-pong ball striking a metal
screen might have produced such a sound.
It was strange and unusual enough to make Lynn Prentiss look up
from the manuscript she was reading and wrinkle her brow. If a fly
had alighted on her cheek she might have paused in much the same
way, startled, incredulous—asking herself if it really could be a fly. A
fly in an air-conditioned office, with all of the windows shut?
The zing puzzled and disturbed her more than a fly would have
done, because the mystery could not be instantly solved with a quick
flick of her thumb.
The angry impatience, the annoyance with trifles which she had
been experiencing all morning—an impatience which hours of
manuscript reading had done nothing to alleviate—turned even so
trivial an unsolved mystery into an infringement on her right to work
undisturbed.
She blew a thin strand of red-gold hair back from her forehead, and
sat for an instant drumming her fingers on the desktop. Then her
woman's curiosity got the better of her. She arose quickly, piled the
unread manuscripts on top of the blue-penciled ones and strode out
of the office.
The clicking of the battered typewriter in the office adjacent to her
own stopped abruptly and Jim Macklin, his collar loosened and his
tie awry, called out to her.
"When you get through taking out commas, Monroe, there's
something here you can help me with. Or maybe you should be
more of the Bardot type. With that sweater you're wearing, it's hard
to tell."
"What is it this time?" she demanded, pausing in the doorway, but
making no attempt to smile. Then, the way he grinned, the boyish
impulsiveness which made him seem out of place in a briskly
efficient magazine office at ten in the morning, caused her face to
soften.
It was insane, of course—that she should think of him in an almost
maternal way. There was a dusting of gray at his temples and he
was almost twice her age. But he was such a big bear cub of a man,
with such a lost-orphan kind of helplessness about him at times, that
he ignited the maternal spark in her.
She hoped it wasn't too bright a spark and that it didn't show in her
eyes. She had a feeling that he could ignite it in other women, too,
and knew it only too well and perhaps even traded on it. A man could
go very far, she told herself with more cynicism than she ordinarily
felt, if he could do that to a woman and be exceptionally virile looking
at the same time.
"I could be wrong," Macklin said. "But I've a feeling that if you'd just
bend over and breathe on this manuscript something wonderful
would happen to it. Just the whiff of a really beautiful femme would
do the trick. The guy has all kinds of complexes and plenty of painful
hungers and I'm not sure the right girl is sitting beside him in chapter
three."
"I bet there's a wolf pack on every page," she said. "I wouldn't be
safe anywhere near a story like that."
"Nope, you're way off base, gorgeous. Just one guy. He's slightly
beat, sure. But basically he's a romantic idealist. He's the kind of guy
it would be hard to separate from a room in Paris overlooking the
Seine. Wine bottles on the floor, tubes of half-squeezed-out paint
scattered around, everything in wild disorder. Being human, with the
hungers and all, he's been out on the Boulevard looking for—I blush
to say it—a pickup. He's found one, but, as I say, I'm not sure she's
the right girl for him. But judge for yourself. It won't take a minute."
"Very amusing, Jim. But I just haven't time right now."
"Make time. You've got all afternoon to work down to the last of your
manuscripts. And this is sure to interest you. She's right there beside
him, sitting on a rumpled couch. Her long blonde hair is falling down
and her lips are slightly parted—"
"Well—"
"Get the picture? Not a morsel of food has touched her lips for two
days, and there's a tragic hopelessness in her eyes. But pallor
becomes her. She's prepared to make any sacrifice, but she hopes
she won't have to. It could develop into a great love, and she's
hoping he'll have the strength to be understanding and wait. All right.
He may look cynical, but he'd no more think of making a pass at that
girl without encouragement than I would."
"You'll get no encouragement from me, you grinning ape!"
"A man can dream, can't he?"
"He can do other things as well. I've learned that much about men
just in the short time I've been reading the stories you've passed on
to me for final editing. Honest writing—stark realism. Brother! I
should be the last to deny that most of it is very, very good. Brimming
over with artistic integrity. Strong writing you'll never find me
objecting to. But I hope you realize I couldn't read stories like that
day after day and remain a naïve little girl from Ohio."
"Now who's doing the kidding," Macklin said, with mock solemnity.
"There are no naïve little girls in Ohio any more—or in Indiana or
Idaho. TV has taken care of that. But why should I deny your
accusation? No punches drawn, baby. That's how Hemingway got
his start, remember?"
Some of the levity went out of her gaze and she shrugged
impatiently. "How would you expect me to remember? His first book
was published twenty years before I was born."
Macklin's grin vanished and a hurt, almost accusing look came into
his eyes. "I was pretty sure you'd read it anyway. That's the fourth
time you've flared up at me in three days. Do you have to catch me
up on everything I say? If you were like Lathrup I could understand it.
She has a compulsion to cut people down to size, men especially.
Three or four sizes smaller than they actually are. It's very bad. I'm
not passing a moral judgment on her, understand? I'm just saying it's
bad."
"What are you trying to say, Jim?"
"That you're not like Lathrup at all. You never had a terrible scare
when you were eight months old—or three years old. You were
never left alone in the dark, in mortal fear, crying out for food and
warmth and not knowing if help would ever come to you. According
to the psychologists, that's what makes people behave the way she
does. A tragic accident in childhood, something parents can't always
help or be held accountable for. You've never had any such scare.
But the way you've been catching me up the past few days—"
Lynn tightened her lips and started to turn away, anger flaming in her
eyes. Then, as if realizing that the rebuke had been merited, she
swung back to face him again and said in a weary voice: "Sorry, Jim.
I guess I've been driving myself too hard. Everyone feels they have
to when Lathrup is in one of her moods. She's been practically
standing over me with a whip for a week now. You can't do your best
work when you're under that kind of pressure. If she could only
realize—"
"She realizes," Macklin said. "She's cutting off her nose to spite her
face, but she can't help it. She won't wreck the concern, no danger of
that. She's too skillful a manipulator. What she loses in one direction,
she'll make up for in another. She knows just how to prevent the
really big blunders that could prove costly. If we publish a few stories
and articles that just get by under the fence, because she's kept us
from exercising our best judgment, it will all even up in the wash.
Gawd, how I'm mixing my metaphors."
Lynn suddenly remembered why she had emerged from her office in
such haste and the mystery of the strange sound began to trouble
her again. It was neurotic, of course, a haywire kind of curiosity that
she ought not to have succumbed to. But whenever she started
anything she liked to finish it.
She thought of asking Macklin to accompany her down the corridor,
but almost instantly thought better of it. He'd probably laugh her
concern to scorn and she'd taxed his patience enough already.
It was her baby and she'd better carry it—as far as the reception
desk anyway. She'd ask Susan Weil, and if Susan hadn't heard
anything she'd know she was being foolish. She'd go back and sit
down and finish the pile of remaining manuscripts. She said goodbye
to Macklin and went on her way.
There were three offices to pass before she reached the end of the
corridor and turned into the small, reception desk alcove.
Three offices to pass ... pigeons in the grass. It sounded like
something from Gertrude Stein, or some nonsense rhyme from
childhood.
She amused herself by repeating it over and over, as most people
are prone to do with snatches of song or meaningless limericks
when they're under tension.
"Why should that sound have disturbed me so much?" she asked
herself and got no answer.
One of the offices, behind which she suspected that Fred Ellers
would be sitting with his tie off, not just awry as Macklin's had been,
presented to her gaze only a frosted glass exterior. The door was
closed and probably locked, for Ellers had a habit of locking himself
in when he was hitting the bottle.
The second office, from which the sound of another clicking
typewriter issued, was occupied by Ruth Porges, trim and
immaculate in the stiff, tailormade suit she customarily wore as if it
were some kind of uniform.
The third door was ajar and a very distinguished-looking individual
sat behind it. Allen Gerstle, white-haired and bespectacled, spent a
lot of time over his exposé columns. He had a rare feeling for
beautiful prose, wasted perhaps at times, but Lynn knew that a good
style was an asset, even when only the cafe society set was
prepared to take it seriously.
Lynn found herself at the reception desk almost before she realized
that she had completely traversed the corridor. Susan Weil was
answering the phone, but she cupped the mouthpiece with her hand
and turned from it when she saw Lynn standing at her elbow.
"Is there something—?" she asked.
"I heard a funny sound a few minutes ago," Lynn said. "It sounded
like ... like...."
"I know," Susan Weil said, helping her. "I heard it too."
"Where do you think it came from?"
"How should I know?" Susan asked, annoyed by a furious buzzing
from the switchboard.
Then the irritation suddenly went out of her eyes and she replied
cooperatively. "From either Eaton's office or Lathrup's office. I didn't
pay much attention to it. It wasn't the only funny sound I've heard
around here. When Lathrup—no, I guess I'd better skip it."
"Why, Susan, for Pete's sake?" Lynn asked, smiling a little. "You
know I wouldn't repeat it. You've as much right as we have to say
what you think. With that graduate major in anthropology you're
using as an excuse to spend the summer at a switchboard when you
could just as easily—oh, well."
"It's simple work and I like it," Susan replied. "I could spend the
summer on Cape Cod and just about squeeze by. But why do it? I
like New York in summer and I can use a little extra dough, and I
don't feel like secretarying for a stuffy old professor of anthropology.
That answer you? When they give out prizes for curiosity—"
"Like Alice in Wonderland, you mean? Curiouser and curiouser.
Okay, I plead guilty. I just happen to be interested in people."
"It's forgotten. I forgive you. About that sound—"
"Let me find out for myself. I've gone too far to turn back now. I may
as well pull out all the stops and make an absolute fool of myself."
A moment later Lynn was standing before the closed door of Helen
Lathrup's private office, wondering if she should knock and
announce herself before entering.
She decided not to knock. Either way, Lathrup was sure to be furious
and she didn't want to be told to go away.
She took firm hold of the knob and opened the door.
The first thing she saw was the glistening red stain on the floor
immediately in front of Lathrup's desk, where blood from the wound
in Lathrup's right temple had trickled down over the front of the desk
to the floor.
Then she saw the blonde head resting on the desk, and the wound
itself and the limp white hand dangling over the edge of the desk.
Lynn Prentiss screamed.
Frederick Ellers had locked the door of his office and was pouring
twelve-year old Bourbon from a private-stock fifth into a paper cup
when he heard the scream.
The glass door was thin, and he could hear the scream distinctly. But
he could not identify the voice, even though it made him sit bolt
upright in his chair, dead sober for an instant.
I'm not the only one, he thought. Someone else has stumbled on
agony.
Then the mist came swirling back and his thoughts became chaotic
again.
Fire me. Just like that ... snap of her fingers. You'd better stay away
from me. That's what I told her. When I go out of here I'm through.
Told her that too. Just because she was so damn mean ... so cold
rotten mean.
Feelings? You'd search a long while ... never find ... woman so
goddam.... Told her I was sorry. How about that? What'd she expect?
Go down on my knees? Listen, wait a minute. Before I'd do that—
Fifty-seven years old. Look at me, I said. Fifty-eight after the next
fifty drinks. Fifty-eight and a fraction. Old, old, old.
Fire me. Didn't get the facts straight. Little straight facts in a big
important article. Facts ... facts. What are a few frigging facts
anyway? I can still write well, can't I? Can't I? Good strong ...
strongstraightforward writing.
Drink too much. Drink all the time. Always polluted. Who am I to
deny it? I'll tell you who I am. Graduate Columbia School of
Journalism. Twelve years on the New York Times, seven Herald
Tribune, five....
Sish to all that. Switch to magazines. Big mistake. Big mistake ever
to switch. Newspaper man. First, foremost and always. Should never
have switched.
That guy down in Florida. Miami? No, hell no. Somewhere in Florida.
Palm Beach? No, no, no. Where then? What's it matter?
Important writer, wonderful guy, Pulitzer Prize winner. Think of it—
Pulitzer Prize winner. Older 'n I am. Sixty-five, maybe seventy by
now. Couldn't keep away from the stuff. Drank, drank, drank—always
polluted. Now he's asking for handouts. Sitting by yacht basin.
Watching the big ones—half-million-dollar yachts. Never own a flat-
bottomed skiff. Neither will I....
Ellers got swayingly to his feet, pushing the chair in which he'd been
sitting back so violently that it toppled over with a crash that caused
him to shudder and cry out, as if a leather thong had bitten cruelly
into his flesh.
He grasped the desk edge with one hand and with the other made
circling motions in the air.
All her fault! Vicious inhuman.... "Don't! Don't come near me, you
bitch. Don't touch me!"
He continued to sway and gesture, his voice rising shrilly. "Bitch,
bitch, bitch!"
Ruth Porges heard the scream and stopped typing. She sat very still,
her hands tightening into fists. After a moment she swayed a little,
but she made no attempt to rise. The old fear of facing anything even
possibly harsh kept her glued to her chair.
It was a fact, a hard fact, that most men found Ruth Porges difficult
and cold and thought of her as unemotional. But she wasn't that way
now and hadn't ever been and never could be that way.
It was a lie, a falsification which she had never quite known how to
refute. She had seen Lathrup refute it for herself when she was not
in one of her moods, when she wanted a man to grab hold of her
and bring his lips down hard on hers.
How often Ruth Porges wanted that too—and more. How often she'd
wished herself dead, not having that, being forced to pretend that it
wasn't important, to lie to herself about it and go on, day after day,
living a lie. To go on knowing how men felt about her, and how
horrible it was that they should feel that way, and how deeply,
sincerely, terribly she wanted them not to look upon her as a
reluctant virgin with ice in her veins.
She wasn't, she wasn't, she didn't want to be. Why couldn't they see
that and understand? Why couldn't they see that she was a woman
with a great wealth of understanding to offer a man, a woman with
the blood warm in her veins, a woman who could free herself to....
A wave of bitterness, or returning rage almost impossible to control,
searing, destructive, hardly to be endured, swept over her and she
buried her face in her hands.
If only Lathrup hadn't—
Roger Bendiner. The only man who'd refused to be angered by her
shyness, by her panic when the moment actually came and she
knew that there was no escape and she'd have to—
Let him undress her. Yes ... yes. She could let herself remember it
now, she could begin to bring it out into the open, with no fear of
being laughed at and misunderstood. His rough hands on her
shoulders and that look in his eyes....
It was like a night of lightning and thunder and you fled into the dark
woods and you fled and were overtaken and stuck down.
But it was what she had always wanted, always longed for, a
bursting wonder and you didn't care about the cruel, dark shafts of
pain.
But with Roger alone. Because Roger wasn't just any man. He
respected her and loved her and was not afraid to frighten her
because he knew that there was nothing for her to fear.
Oh, why was she lying to herself, even now? She would never see
him again. Even if he came back to her, and begged her forgiveness
for what he had done, even if he swore that Helen Lathrup meant
nothing to him, she could never forgive him. It was too late, too late
now, too late for—
The desk shook with her sobbing.
He stood by the down elevator with a bulging briefcase under his

arm, a pale, hatless young man with unruly dark hair and deepset,
feverishly bright eyes. His features were gaunt, the cheekbone
region looking almost cavernous beneath the heavy overhang of his
brow. A strange face, a remarkable face, not unappealing, but
different somehow—a young-old face with bony contours, strange
ridges, and depressions, a shadowy ruggedness of aspect which
some women might have greatly liked and others looked upon with
disfavor.
He was staring now at the double glass door with its gilt lettering—
hateful to him now. EATON-LATHRUP PUBLICATIONS. He had
come out of that door for the last time, he told himself, with a sudden
trembling which he was powerless to control. He was free of her at
last and he'd never go back again.
If a man is born with just one kidney or a right-sided heart how can
he hope to operate on himself and make himself resemble the
general run of people?
She'd encouraged him, hadn't she? Given him the feeling that she
did understand, did sympathize. She'd acted at first like another
Thomas Wolfe had walked into the office.
Could he help it if he was one of the few, one of the chosen, a really
great writer? It was tragic and terrible perhaps and people hated him
for it, but could he help it?
If she felt that he had no talent why had she built him up at first? It
didn't make sense. Why had she built him up and then tried to tear
him down? Why had she attacked him with pages of criticism,
carping, unreasonable, tearing the guts out of his manuscripts?
She'd made him feel like a high school boy flunking an exam in
English composition. And what had happened once between them
didn't mean anything. How could it have meant anything when she'd
turned on him like that?
He closed his eyes again, remembering, and the torment within him
increased. He could see her eyes again, level with his own, and feel
the softness of her body pressed so close that it seemed to mold
itself into his own flesh, and he could smell again the perfume she'd
worn, and taste the sweetness of her lips....
The elevator door swung open, startling him. He moved quickly past
the operator and stood behind the one other passenger—a stoutish
woman with a briefcase very similar to his own—and waited for the
door to close again with a sudden look of panic in his eyes.
At any moment now his nerves would start shrieking again. He had
to get back to the street and into the subway before his heart began
to pound and his temples swelled to bursting, had to bury himself in
the anonymity of a crowd that knew nothing about him and—
because they didn't know—couldn't turn on him and bare their claws
as she had done.
He had to get away before the inward screaming began again.
Chapter III
There was a screaming inside of her and she couldn't seem to
breathe. She was being followed. Someone had stepped out of a
warehouse doorway and was following her, matching his pace with
hers, keeping close on her heels.
She dared not look back, because he was being very careful not to
let the distance between them lengthen, even for an instant, and she
was afraid of what she might see in his eyes.
Ordinarily she would have become indignant, turned abruptly and
faced him, threatened to call a policeman. Then—if he had
attempted to grab her, if he had turned ugly—she would have
screamed for help.
But now she only wanted to escape as quickly as possible from the
terrible ordeal that had made her almost physically ill—twice before
leaving her office she had been on the verge of fainting and she'd
had to clutch a policeman's arm for support. But the mere thought of
facing another policeman, of meeting his cool, arrogant gaze—yes,
they were arrogant when they asked you question after question,
even though they knew and you knew that not the slightest shadow
of suspicion rested upon you—now just the thought of coming face
to face with a policeman again was intolerable to her.
Pretending to be sympathetic, understanding, big-brotherly but
always the cool, arrogant persistence lurking in the depths of their
eyes. She remembered: "I know it's been mighty nerve-shattering for
you, Miss Prentiss. A terrible shock. Just to walk into her office, and
see her lying there—"
The big, slow-talking one especially, with the beat-up face—a
detective lieutenant, he'd said he was. All afternoon until she couldn't
endure another moment of it ... the office filled with policemen and
photographers and Lathrup not even mercifully covered with a sheet,
her dead eyes staring. Not that she'd gone in again to look or would
have been permitted inside after the medical examiner had arrived
and they'd started dusting the office for fingerprints. But she could
picture it, she knew exactly how it was, because Macklin had gone in
for a brief moment to discuss something very important with them,
and had told her how it was, not sparing her any of the details. (Not
his fault! She'd nodded and let him talk on.)
The body stretched out on the floor, with chalk marks on the desk to
indicate just how it had been resting when—resting! How mocking,
how horrible the image that one word conjured up!
They'd let her go at last, advising her to take a taxi home but to go to
a restaurant first and eat something—a sandwich, at least—with two
or three cups of black coffee.
Out on the street she'd begun to breathe more freely, had felt the
horror receding a little, the strength returning to her limbs. Then,
suddenly, terribly, unexpectedly—this!
The footsteps seemed louder than they should have been, even
though he was very close behind her and was making no effort to
cushion his tread. Each step seemed to strike the pavement with a
hollow sound, making her feel for an instant as if she'd become
entrapped in a stone vault, and he was walking, not behind, but
above her, sending hollow echoes reverberating through—
Her tomb? Dear God, no! She must not allow such thoughts to creep
into her mind. Quite possibly she was completely mistaken about
him, and he wasn't deliberately following her at all.
It happened often enough. Two people hurrying to catch a train or
bus, or headed for the same destination, walking along a street
where office buildings had been replaced by warehouses and empty
stores, with no other pedestrians in sight and dusk just starting to
gather. It was so easy to imagine that you were the victim of
calculated pursuit.
She must keep fear at arm's length, Lynn told herself, despite the
wild fluttering of her heart, must not give way to panic or hysteria.
Otherwise her wrought-up state would warp her judgment and make
her do something she'd regret.
The sensible thing to do would be to slow her pace slightly, turn and
glance casually back at him, as any woman might do at dusk on a
deserted street. It would not indicate that she actually thought that he
was following her deliberately or with criminal intent. It would just
imply slight bewilderment, a curiosity easy to understand. He
wouldn't take offense and it would put an end to all doubt.
But somehow she couldn't even do that! What if she turned and saw
that his eyes were fastened upon her as she feared they might be?
What if she saw that they were not just the eyes of an annoyer of
women, some tormented sex-starved wretch who couldn't resist
making an ugly nuisance of himself—what if they were the eyes of a
murderer?
What if they were the eyes of a man who had killed once and would
not hesitate to kill again—a man with the murder weapon still in his
possession, a man who would feel no qualms about putting a bullet
in her heart if he suspected that she knew more than she did about
Helen Lathrup's murder?
What if he'd found out in some way that she'd been the first to
discover what he had done, and that she had been talking to the
police, answering their shrewd and persistent questions all
afternoon? What if he thought he'd left some damning clue, some
tell-tale piece of evidence in Lathrup's office—something which had
slipped Lynn's mind completely, but which might come back to her
later?
She was quite sure she'd told the police everything. But how could
he be expected to know that? Could he afford to let her go on living
long enough for some damning memory to come back to her?
He might even be a homicidal maniac. She wasn't a child. She'd
read a great many books that dealt with such horrors in a clinical,
completely realistic way. One murder was just the beginning; just the
igniting spark. They had to kill again and again. The first slaying
made them even more dangerous, more insensately brutal and
enraged. They weren't satisfied until they had vented their rage on
many victims, had waded through a sea of blood.
The mental hospitals were filled with them but you never knew where
you'd meet one—on the street, in a bus, sitting next to you in a
crowded subway train.
"Lady, I just don't like you. All my life you've been getting in my hair.
I've never set eyes on you before, but this time I'm going to wring
your neck."
She saw the lighted window of a restaurant out of the corner of her
eye and breathed a sigh of relief. She was almost abreast of it, but
not quite—there was an empty store she'd have to pass first, as dark
as a funeral parlor when the embalmer has turned out all of the lights
and gone home for the night. And the footsteps seemed suddenly
even closer, as if in another moment she'd be feeling his hot breath
on the back of her neck.
She quickened her own steps, almost breaking into a run. She heard
him draw in his breath sharply, but she forced herself not to think, to
keep her eyes fastened on the lighted pane until she was at the door
of the restaurant and pressing against the heavy plate glass with all
her strength. The door opened inward—slowly, too slowly—and then
she was inside, safe for the moment, with light streaming down and
two rough-looking men at the counter and a waitress writing out a
check and a big, heavyset man with steel-hard eyes at the cashier's
desk who glanced at her quickly and then seemed to lose interest in
her.
She wasn't disappointed or irritated or even slightly piqued by his
lack of interest—not at all. She wanted to throw her arms around him
and say: "Thank you. Thank you for just being here."
She went quickly to a table and sat down, not trusting herself to sit at
the counter, unable to control the trembling of her hands. Not just her
hands—her shoulders were shaking too, and she would have been
embarrassed and ashamed if one of the two men at the counter had
turned to her and asked, "What's wrong, lady?" and looked at her the
way such men usually do when they see a chance to ingratiate
themselves with a young and attractive woman in distress—thinking
perhaps that she'd had a little too much to drink and they might
stand a chance with her if they went about it in just the right way.
She couldn't parry that sort of thing now—even though it was
comparatively harmless if you knew how to look after yourself and
there was often a real solicitude mixed up with the amorous, slightly
smirking part of it.
She saw him then—saw him for the first time. A tall, very thin young
man, not more than twenty-four at the most, hatless and a bit
unkempt-looking with burning dark eyes that seemed to dissolve the
glass barrier between them as he stared in at her through the
window.
Only for an instant—and then he was gone. He moved quickly back
from the window and his form became vague, half-swallowed up in
the twilight outside. Whether he'd crossed the street or continued on
down the street she had no way of knowing. He was simply not there
any more.
A sudden tightness gripped her throat and a chill blew up her spine.
How completely not there? Would he be waiting for her when she left
the restaurant, standing perhaps in the doorway of another building,
and falling into step behind her again the instant she passed?
She refused to let herself think about that. There was no real need
for her to think about it, for she could phone for a cab from the

Textbook God and International Relations Christian Theology and World Politics 1St Edition Mika Luoma Aho Ebook All Chapter PDF

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Textbook God and International Relations Christian Theology and World Politics 1St Edition Mika Luoma Aho Ebook All Chapter PDF

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God and International Relations

Christian Theology and World Politics

Historical Institutionalism and International

International Humanitarian NGOs and State Relations

Jewish Public Theology God and the Global City Abraham

Unauthorised Humanitarian Interventions in World

Pessimism in International Relations: Provocations,

God and Creation in the Theology of Thomas Aquinas and

The Globalization of World Politics An Introduction to

Palgrave Handbook of Inter-Organizational Relations in

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9781441138668_Pre_Final_txt_print.indd iii 2/22/2001 8:22:25 PM

© Mika Luoma-aho, 2012

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India

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1 Secularization of Theological Concepts 1

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William E. Connolly touches the heart of the matter discussing the

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social scientist I have worked in different universities, in Finland and

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This book is also an attempt to consider—or indeed reconsider—

1. The political potential of symbolism. We are surrounded by symbols of

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roadside, application icons on our computer desktop, and so on.

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but the myth of the state as a “peacemaker” lingers on despite glar-

I am not claiming originality with my argument(s). All of this and much

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In my opinion this suggestion reflects an intellectual disposition before

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Secularization of Theological Concepts

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references to continental legal theory. What Schmitt is trying to make

In the theory of the state of the seventeenth century, the monarch is

The systematic structure inherited from Christian theology serves a

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through a publicly present one” and conceiving “a type of being that is

I authorise and give up my right of governing myself to this man, or

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Schmitt in fact does is decontextualize sovereign subjectivity as it was

This is concrete sovereignty: the highest, legally independent, underived

We no longer live under the dominion of persons, either natural per-

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Unfortunately, for Krabbe I suppose, political theory had not kept up

Political absolutism [has] a political theory at its disposal which

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a logical position to take, for Hobbes as it was for Schmitt, because it

1.1 Symbolism and Beyond

In the previous section I discussed a debate concerning the possibility

The individual is socialized to be a designated person and to inhabit

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produced in the same dialectic [. . .] between the individual and those

This socialization is an ordering of experience, and a meaningful order

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linguistic signification attains the maximum detachment from the

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