The Kingdom and the Garden

There is an unreached intellectual location, imaginal or real (or something else besides) like the fountain of youth (sought by eleventh-century crusaders in the Far East and by sixteenth-century conquistadors in the New World) or the isle of the blessed (sought by St. Brendan the Voyager in the sixth century), that holds out the promise of human happiness and which, even in its vain pursuit in history, may permit the best political theology to be elaborated in our time. This promise challenges all politics and every theology, and whether it is, in the end, a fantastical mirage or otherworldly vision, its open possibility in the present is what matters for practical theory. The most capacious vision of the Good gives political thinking its deepest profundity. One should never forget this lesson from Plato; it is the heavenly sign under which Agamben labors in The Kingdom and the Garden. In...

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