Principalities and Powers

I. The Passage

For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.

— Ephesians 6:12

We moderns read this and think: superstition. The ancients believed in demons and angels, in spiritual forces that manipulated earthly affairs. We have outgrown such things. We have Foucault now, and systems theory, and institutional analysis. We understand that power is structural, diffuse, capillary — that it operates through discourse and discipline rather than through supernatural beings pulling strings.

But what if Paul already knew what Foucault discovered? What if the ancient diagnosis was more sophisticated than our chronological snobbery allows us to see?

The Greek terms repay attention:

• Archai — principalities, but also origins, first principles, the foundational logic of a thing

• Exousiai — authorities, powers, the capacity to act that inheres in structures

• Kosmokratoras — world-rulers, literally those who hold the cosmos, the administrators of the age

• Pneumatika tēs ponērias — spiritual forces of evil, the animating spirit of wicked systems

These are not merely demons in the medieval sense — red creatures with pitchforks tormenting individuals. These are the spirits of systems. The inner logic of empires. The self-perpetuating nature of institutions. The way a structure shapes everyone inside it regardless of individual intention.

Paul is telling the early church: your enemy is not Nero. Kill Nero and another Nero appears. Your enemy is not the centurion or the tax collector or the provincial governor. These are flesh and blood, and flesh and blood is not your war.

Your war is against the principality that produces endless Neros. Against the power that makes tax collection automatic and normalized. Against the world-rulers who administer the age so completely that their rule seems like nature itself.

This is not primitive. This is the most sophisticated political theology ever articulated.

II. Why Subject Peoples See Clearly

There is a reason this insight came from Jews and not from Romans.

When you are at the center of power, you experience power as decisions. Senators debate. Emperors decree. Generals command. Power appears to be what powerful people do. It has faces and names. It seems like flesh and blood all the way down.

But when you are subject to power — when you have been conquered by Babylon, Persia, Greece, and Rome in succession — you experience power differently. You experience it as structure. As something that persists regardless of who wears the crown. As a logic that transcends individuals.

The Babylonians destroyed the Temple and deported the elite. The Persians let them return. The Greeks desecrated the altar. The Romans rebuilt Herod’s Temple as a monument to client-king collaboration. Different flesh and blood, same underlying pattern: Israel squeezed between empires, subject to powers it could not control by controlling any individual.

Daniel 10 speaks of the “Prince of Persia” — an angelic or demonic power that stands behind the earthly kingdom, such that the earthly kingdom is merely its visible manifestation. This is not primitive demonology. This is the recognition that Persia-as-system has properties that no individual Persian possesses. The empire has a spirit — emergent properties, self-perpetuating dynamics, a way of being that would continue even if every Persian were replaced.

Subject peoples learn to see the principality because they cannot afford the illusion that power is merely personal.

III. The Genius of Rome Was Not the Legions

Consider what Roman rule actually meant for a provincial subject.

You could live your entire life without seeing a Roman soldier. The legions were at the frontiers. The Pax Romana meant, precisely, that internal violence was unnecessary because the structure was so complete.

And yet you were governed — totally, pervasively, in every aspect of your existence.

The roads you walked were Roman roads, built to move troops and commerce, connecting you to an empire you had never chosen to join. The coins in your purse bore Caesar’s image and Caesar’s claims to divinity. The taxes you paid funded an apparatus you would never see. The law under which you lived was Roman law, applied by local elites who had been co-opted into the system of client patronage. The gods you were expected to honor included, increasingly, the emperor himself.

This is not rule by flesh and blood. This is rule by system. By roads and coins and laws and rituals and administrative procedures and economic dependencies. The centurion with a sword is the least of it. The centurion is flesh and blood, and can be evaded, bribed, or martyred against. But how do you evade a road? How do you resist a coin? How do you martyr yourself against a tax code?

The principality is the thing that makes all the flesh and blood interchangeable. Governors come and go. Emperors rise and fall. The system persists.

Paul understood this. His churches were spread across the empire, connected by those very Roman roads, using that very Roman postal system, navigating those very structures of provincial administration. He saw the principality from the inside. And he told his readers: this is your real enemy. Not the proconsul who happens to occupy the seat this year. The power that produces proconsuls. The world-ruler that is Rome itself — not Rome the city or Rome the people, but Rome the system, Rome the spirit, Rome the total structure that shapes everything it touches.

IV. Emperor Worship and the Colonization of the Interior

Here is where Rome anticipated our therapeutic managers and platform lords.

Rome did not care what you believed. This is crucial. The empire was full of religions, cults, philosophies, mystery schools. Believe whatever you want. Rome is tolerant.

Rome cared about compliance. Specifically: participation in the imperial cult. The public sacrifice. The pinch of incense before Caesar’s image. The formal acknowledgment that Caesar is Lord, that Rome is eternal, that the imperial order is divine.

You did not have to mean it. You did not have to feel it. You only had to do it. The requirement was behavioral, not psychological. Perform the ritual and you are free to think whatever you wish in the privacy of your own mind.

This seems like a light burden. What is a pinch of incense? A moment’s gesture, and then you go about your business. The interior remains your own.

But the early Christians understood something that we have forgotten: compliance shapes the interior over time.

The gesture you make without believing, you will come to believe through making. The words you speak ironically, you will come to speak sincerely. The ritual you perform as mere form, you will come to experience as substance. The self is not a citadel, unchanged by what the body does. The self is formed by practice. Kneel long enough and you will forget how to stand.

This is why the martyrs refused the pinch of incense. Not because they were stupid. Not because they didn’t understand that it was “just” a formality. But because they understood that the “just” was a lie. There is no “just” a formality. Every formality forms.

The empire needed the ritual precisely because the ritual worked. Not by changing minds — the empire did not care about minds — but by shaping souls. A population that performs submission becomes submissive. A people that ritually acknowledges Caesar as Lord will, over time, come to experience Caesar as Lord, whatever they think they believe.

The principality colonizes the interior through the exterior. It does not need to argue. It only needs to mandate behavior. The argument happens automatically, inside the soul of the compliant, who must reconcile their actions with their self-image.

Does this sound familiar?

V. The Therapeutic Pinch of Incense

The modern therapeutic system does not demand that you believe. It demands that you perform.

Attend the training. Use the language. Acknowledge your privilege. Affirm the stated values of the institution. You do not have to mean it. The HR department cannot read your mind. They can only monitor your behavior.

And so the sophisticated modern says: I will play the game. I will mouth the words. I will attend the session and nod at the right moments and sign the statement. Inside, I will remain free. The interior is my own.

But the interior is not your own. It never was. The self that mouths the words becomes, over time, the self that means them. The self that performs compliance becomes compliant. The ritual works on you whether you believe in it or not — perhaps especially if you believe you are exempt because you are only pretending.

The early Christians refused the pretense because they understood that there is no such thing as “just” pretending. The performance is the thing. The gesture makes the soul.

This is why the therapeutic system demands behavioral compliance rather than belief. It learned — whether consciously or through institutional evolution — what Rome knew: you do not need to convince people. You only need to get them to act. The conviction follows.

Every confession of privilege, every acknowledgment of unconscious bias, every repetition of the liturgy — these are pinches of incense. The one who offers them “ironically” will not remain ironic. The soul cannot sustain permanent internal division. It will reconcile the behavior with the self-image, and the reconciliation will favor the behavior, because the behavior is what is real.

VI. The Platform Pinch of Incense

The platform system operates differently but toward the same end.

It does not demand confession. It does not require you to say anything. It only requires that you use. Scroll. Click. Share. Purchase. The behavior is the product. Your beliefs are irrelevant; your actions are data.

But the actions shape the interior just as surely as the therapeutic confession does.

The self that scrolls becomes a scrolling self. The self that clicks becomes a clicking self. The attention that is harvested becomes an attention that can only be harvested — shortened, fragmented, incapable of sustained focus on anything the algorithm did not serve.

You may hate the platform while using it. You may critique the attention economy while participating in it. You may understand, theoretically, that your behavior is being shaped. None of this protects you. The shaping happens below the level of belief. It happens in the formation of habit, the restructuring of desire, the gradual atrophy of capacities that go unused.

The platform does not need your incense. It needs your time. And time given is time that forms. Hours on the platform are hours becoming the kind of person who spends hours on the platform.

Here too the early Christians offer guidance: you cannot serve two masters. Not because service is a matter of belief — you could theoretically believe in one master while serving another — but because service is formative. What you serve, you become. The hours teach the soul.

VII. The Armor of God as Counter-Formation

Immediately after identifying the principalities and powers, Paul prescribes the armor of God:

Stand therefore, having your loins girt about with truth, and having on the breastplate of righteousness; and your feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace; above all, taking the shield of faith, wherewith ye shall be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked. And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.

— Ephesians 6:14-17

This is not merely metaphor. This is a program of counter-formation.

The principalities form through behavior. They shape the soul through what the body does. The armor of God is an alternative set of practices — alternative behaviors — that form the soul differently.

Truth — not as abstract proposition but as practice. The commitment to seeing clearly, to naming things as they are, to refusing the official story when the official story is false. The principalities rule through mystification. Truth-telling is resistance.

Righteousness — again, not as status but as practice. Living differently. Behaving according to a different logic than the logic of the principality. The breastplate protects the heart by giving the heart a different set of habits.

The gospel of peace — a counter-narrative to the Pax Romana, which was peace through domination. The gospel offers peace through reconciliation, through the breaking of the dividing walls. This is political, not merely spiritual. It constitutes an alternative community with different practices of peace.

Faith — the shield that quenches the fiery darts. The darts are not temptations in the medieval sense. They are the claims of the principality. The claim to ultimacy. The claim that Caesar is Lord. The claim that the system is the world. Faith is the practice of refusing those claims, of grounding identity elsewhere, of having a Lord before whom Caesar is relativized.

Salvation — the helmet protects the head, the mind. The assurance of salvation is the assurance that the principality does not have the last word. That its categories are not final. That there is a judgment beyond its judgment, an identity beyond its identity-assignments.

The word of God — the only offensive weapon. The counter-narrative. The story that tells a different story than the principality tells. The naming of the powers, which is also the relativizing of the powers.

This is not a recipe for violent revolution. You do not fight principalities with swords because principalities are not flesh and blood. You fight principalities with alternative formation. With practices that shape the soul differently than the principality shapes it. With communities that embody a different logic.

The early church was such a community.

VIII. The Parallel Polis of the Early Church

The early Christians did not attempt to seize power. They did not form armies or political parties. They did not lobby Caesar for better policies.

They built alternative structures.

Economic: the sharing of goods, the collection for the poor, the obligation of mutual aid. A member of the early church was embedded in an alternative economy that cut across the normal divisions of patron and client, slave and free.

Social: the common meal, the agape feast, the eucharist. A practice of fellowship that violated the social boundaries of the Roman world — Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female at the same table. This was not merely symbolic. It was formative. The meal made the community, and the community was a different kind of social body than anything the empire offered.

Narrative: the proclamation of Jesus as Lord, which was a direct counter-claim to Caesar as Lord. The telling and retelling of the story — in liturgy, in catechesis, in the reading of Scripture — that constituted an alternative frame for understanding reality.

Ritual: baptism as death to the old self and birth to the new. A ritual that enacted, bodily, the transfer of allegiance from one dominion to another. The empire understood this. It was precisely the ritual refusal — not a philosophical objection but a bodily non-compliance — that Rome could not tolerate.

Temporal: the Lord’s Day, the Christian calendar, the rhythm of fast and feast. An alternative structuring of time that pulled the Christian out of the imperial calendar and into a different story.

This is what Václav Havel would later call the “parallel polis” — the construction of alternative institutions within the shell of the dominant order. Not revolution, which merely seizes the existing structures. Not reform, which merely adjusts the existing structures. But the patient building of different structures, operating by different logic, forming souls differently.

The early church did not ask Rome’s permission. It did not wait for Constantine. It built — in the catacombs, in house churches, in networks of mutual aid — a counter-formation to the principalities and powers.

And it worked. Not by overthrowing Rome but by outlasting it. By forming souls that the empire could not fully claim. By maintaining an interior room that the imperial ritual could not colonize.

IX. What Modernity Forgot

The Enlightenment taught us to look for power in the wrong places.

It taught us to look for sovereigns — kings, constitutions, laws. Visible power, located in identifiable institutions, wielded by identifiable people. The project of modernity was to constrain this visible power through checks and balances, rights and procedures, democracy and rule of law.

This was not foolish. Visible power is real and constraining it was a genuine achievement.

But in focusing on flesh and blood, modernity lost Paul’s insight: the principalities are not flesh and blood. The deepest power is structural, systemic, formative. It operates through the shaping of souls, not through the coercion of bodies. It colonizes the interior, not by argument but by practice.

Foucault rediscovered this. His account of disciplinary power, of biopower, of governmentality — this is a secular translation of Paul’s principalities. Power that operates through institutions, through discourse, through the very categories by which we understand ourselves. Power that does not need to coerce because it has already formed the subject who will comply voluntarily.

But Foucault offered only diagnosis, not cure. He could name the principalities but he had no armor of God. He had no alternative formation. He had no parallel polis.

The therapeutic system and the platform system are principalities in Paul’s sense. They are not flesh and blood. Mark Zuckerberg did not design the attention economy; he surfs it. The DEI administrator did not invent the therapeutic frame; she is as captured by it as anyone. These systems have their own logic, their own reproduction, their own way of shaping souls. They persist regardless of who occupies any particular role.

And we have forgotten how to fight them.

We argue. We critique. We post. We vote. All of this is flesh and blood resistance to a power that is not flesh and blood. It is fighting the centurion while ignoring the empire. It is refusing this particular proconsul while accepting the principality that produces proconsuls.

X. The Recovery of the Ancient Strategy

What would it mean to fight the principalities as the early church fought them?

First: recognize that the enemy is not flesh and blood. Stop trying to capture the institutions. Stop thinking that the right president, the right CEO, the right policy will fix things. The principality does not care who occupies the positions. It will form them to its purposes or expel them.

Second: understand that compliance shapes the interior. Stop believing you can participate ironically. Stop thinking that you can use the platforms without becoming the kind of person who uses platforms. Stop performing the therapeutic rituals while maintaining private dissent. The performance is the thing. The ritual forms.

Third: build alternative structures. Not in opposition to the principalities — opposition keeps you in their frame — but parallel to them. Economic structures of mutual aid that do not depend on the platform. Social structures of real presence that do not depend on algorithmic connection. Narrative structures that tell a different story. Ritual structures that form different souls.

Fourth: practice counter-formation intentionally. The armor of God is not automatic. It requires practice. The commitment to truth-telling, to righteous living, to the counter-narrative, to faith that refuses the principality’s claims — these are disciplines. They require community. They require repetition. They require the formation of habit against the grain of the dominant formation.

Fifth: play the long game. The early church did not defeat Rome in a generation. It took three centuries before Constantine, and Constantine was not the victory — he was the beginning of a new form of capture. The parallel polis strategy is multi-generational. It forms children. It builds institutions that outlast individuals. It plants seeds whose harvest others will reap.

XI. The Ancient Revelation

We have not discovered anything new.

We flatter ourselves that we have achieved unprecedented insight into structural power, into the formation of subjects, into the operations of systems that transcend individuals. We give it new names — biopower, disciplinary society, algorithmic governance — and imagine we are the first to see.

But Paul saw. The prophets saw. The apocalyptic tradition saw. They named the principalities and powers, the rulers of this present darkness, the beasts that rise from sea and earth. They understood that flesh and blood is not the enemy. They understood that compliance forms the soul. They understood that the only resistance is counter-formation, alternative community, the patient building of structures with a different spirit.

The diagnosis is ancient. The cure is ancient. What is modern is only our forgetting.

The therapeutic system tells us we are sick and offers endless treatment. This is the beast that wants the interior.

The platform system tells us we are free and offers endless choice. This is the beast that owns the exterior.

Both are principalities. Both shape souls. Both can be named, and the naming is the beginning of resistance.

But only the beginning. After the naming comes the building. The construction of the parallel polis. The formation of communities that embody a different logic. The practice of disciplines that shape souls differently.

This is what the early church did. This is what every genuine resistance has always done. Not seize power but build alternatives. Not reform the principality but outlast it. Not argue with the beast but form souls that the beast cannot digest.

The armor of God is not metaphor. It is method.

Put it on.

For we wrestle not against flesh and blood.

This was true in Rome. It is true now.

The principalities have new names, new technologies, new methods of formation.

But they are still principalities. And the ancient weapons still work.

Truth. Righteousness. The gospel of peace. Faith. Salvation. The word of God.

These are not beliefs to hold. They are practices to embody. They are counter-formations to undertake.

The early church knew this. We forgot.

It is time to remember.