JULIE STONE PETERS
A “BRIDGE OVER CHAOS”: DE JURE BELLI,
SOVEREIGNTY, GLOBALISM, AND THE MODERN LAW OF NATIONS
PAINTED AROUND 1666, the year before the publication of Milton’s Paradise
Lost, Luca Giordano’s “The Archangel Michael Routs the Rebel Angels” offers what one might think of as an allegory
of seventeenth-century fantasies of world order. Giordano departs from the
iconography of earlier paintings such as Pieter Bruegel’s
“Fall of the Rebel Angels” (1562), in which the fallen angels—creatures at once
of air, sea, and land—figure the hybridity of heaven
and hell itself in the moment of chaos that is the war in heaven. In Giordano,
roughly a century later, the two realms are clearly separated: one in light,
one in darkness, clouds above, smoke and hellfire below. Here, the archangel
Michael, bathed in light and dressed in classical attire, seems to push Satan
and his fellow rebels downward into the darkness with his foot, holding his
sword aloft like a sign. For the sake of peace, the cosmos must be split into
separate realms, boundaries established, and the demons left to their own
demonic world. Yet Michael also must remain in place, his liberatory
and yet menacing sword aloft, to keep the borders of heaven inviolate and
preserve the cosmic rule of law.
The establishment of sovereign boundaries watched over by a global legal order
that preserves the right to transgress those boundaries in order to protect the
ordered sovereignty they represent: this has become our central paradigm of
world order. Painted during what was arguably the crucial moment of this
paradigm’s formation in the mid-seventeenth century, Giordano’s version of the
fall of the rebel angels offers us an image that encapsulates some of its
paradoxes: the simultaneous creation of sovereignty as ur-principle
and of global rights as super-principle; the legal prohibition of violence and
an insistence on violence as the heart of the global legal order; the
recognition of global law’s very dependence on global chaos for its existence.
Giordano’s painting offers us a glimpse into what I would like to look at here
more closely: two complex seventeenth-century visions of the developing global
legal order, with all its anxieties—the order which ultimately became ours.
In Paradise Lost,
Arguably, one of the poem’s central problems is what to do about unjust war
(waged by the forces of evil). God’s
solution to the anarchy and moral confusion produced by unjust war is the
waging of a just war followed by an act of geographical separation. Cosmically
linked, Heaven and Hell are nonetheless to be territorially sovereign, each
constrained within its own boundaries and ruled by a “sovereign” with absolute
dominion: God in heaven, seated on his “sovran
Throne” (5.656), and Satan in Pandaemonium, seated
“High on a Throne of Royal State” (2.1) and ruling “by command/Of Sovran power”
(1.752-53). There is, admittedly, a certain ambiguity here: Satan’s “Sovran
power” ultimately derives from and depends on God’s. Nevertheless, just as God
will eventually grant Adam and Eve autonomy within their sphere, so he offers
Satan a similar freedom to rule—and to sin—as he will.