Review- Ernst H. Kantorowicz. The
King’s Two Bodies with a New Preface by William Chester Jordan. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1997.
Kantorowicz’s The King’s Two Bodies has entered the
annals of medieval history in particular, and history in general. William
Chester Jordan, in the preface to this work, states that, even though the first
draft of The King’s Two Bodies dates
to 1955, the work is still “indispensable for all investigations of staatstheorie and political theology”
(p.xiv), and furthermore, the work “remains indeed, a wonderfully exciting and
constantly rewarding book” (p.xv). On the one hand, Kantorowicz’s perspective,
by his own admission (p.xix), is narrow: he focuses on the concept of the duality
of the king as an institution and a person (Introduction). On the other hand,
the conclusions cannot possibly limit themselves to this duality. That is, the
notion of The King’s Two Bodies become as much historical practice and behavior
as it is an ideology.
Kantorowicz begins his work with
a conundrum that was posed by a legal case: in 1715, King George III wished to
hold some royal land as private property. Parliament denied the king’s request.
For them, the King was legally immortal, always and permanently King. And yet,
the person of the king is mortal (p.4-5). It is this idea of the persona mixta, of the immortal King and
mortal king that Kantorowicz investigates.
Kantorowicz finds the ultimate
expression of the King’s two bodies in the legal writings of the Tudor lawyers.
In a series of legal cases, the lawyers of the Tudor period articulated the
notion that the individual, once king, was endowed with the spirit of the
office, which spirit migrated from one body politic to another freely upon the
death of a monarch. The execution of Charles I in 1642 confirmed that this body
politic, the idea of the immortal King, needed not be a single person: after
the death of Charles, the King resided in Parliament. From these anecdotes,
Kantorowicz identifies a crucial paradigm: the individual king, like Christ,
was endowed with a mortal essence as well as an immortal one, even if this
particular aspect is not stated explicitly (Chapter 1).
Kantorowicz sees the development
of the King’s two bodies in the dialogues between church and state. The crucial
point that Kantorowicz identifies is that the King’s two bodies arises from the
progressive secularization of the Church and its opposite, the sanctification
of the temporal powers of the state. The first development is the idea that the
king is a persona mixta, like Christ,
a mediator between heaven and earth. The bishops, Kantorowicz state, are also personae mixtae in that same way. In the
works of the Anonymous Norman, both king and bishop are both expressions of the
incarnation of Christ on earth. The one caveat is that the Anonymous Norman,
Kantorowicz argues is not a part of his time, but the representation of
antiquated ideologies (chapter 3).
The rediscovery of the Roman
legal tradition changes the ideological battlefields (Chapter 4). From purely rhetorical concepts, royal and
papal lawyers both considered the legal implications of the persona mixta. The king changes from vicarius Christi and thus mediator
between heaven and earth, to the mediator between natural or divine law, and
equity or temporal law. The king derived his former power from his right to
legislate, given by the lex regia,
and his duty to obey, as expressed in the lex
digna. The conundrum of the king as supreme legislator and yet subject to
his own laws brought about a crucial development: Bracton distinguished between
the temporary ties that binds him to his
subjects (res privata) and the permanent
ties that bind him to his realm (res
fisca) (p.165-193).
Bracton’s ideas, though centered
on England, had echoes in ecclesiastical discourses, which, in turn, are
mirrored in secular ideologies (Chapter 5): the abstraction of the realm as patria and organic imagery for the
state, with the pope/king as head, and the commonwealth as body (Thomas
Aquinas, p.204). Papal lawyers established the pope as the head of the corpus mysticum and the corpus iudicum. The parallel
developments stems from the definition of the realm as imperium sacrum, a notion directly borrowed from Roman Law. The anointment and the
coronation also increasingly come to mean that the king is married to his
commonwealth, which means that the nature of kingship becomes centered on the polity.
The reign of Philip IV the Fair takes the imagery even further, the king asks
his people to protect the realm, and the dynasty (p.250-267).
This relationship is not yet
complete. In the works of secular theorists like Dubois, the king/head can
still die (p.269). It is only with the rediscovery of Aristotelitian notions of
infinite continuity and the demonstration that the individual is representative
of an eternal genus. From this,
Kantorowicz develops the notion of political permanence (chapter 6). All that
remains is to apply the same perpetuity to the head. This, Kantorowicz argues,
can only be done, once three conditions are met: establishing 1) the perpetuity
of the dynasty, 2) the corporate character of the crown, and 3) the immortality
of royal dignity. The first condition is
met once the kings remove the necessity for both coronation and election. For
instance, Philip III, due to political expediency, becomes king without
election and before coronation upon the death of St Louis (p.328). The second
is met once the crown is divorced from the person of the king, but not the
office. This was achieved when jurists began to blur the distinction between
crown and king (p.359-381). Finally, dignitas
becomes synonymous with the immortal genus
mentioned in chapter 6. As such, royal dignity allows the transference of
authority from one dynast to the next, or, from one body politic to another
(p.389-449). Dante finishes Kantorowicz’s analysis by establishing the parallel
between man and Adam, the archetype of transcendence and human perfection
(chapter 8).
Unlike intellectual historians,
Kantorowicz focuses on the evolution of the idea. While the intellectual
historian organizes his work by scholars, Kantorowicz organizes the work around
the evolution of the concept. As such, humans themselves are only relevant as
articulators of the idea, and are not major players. Thus must one understand the criticism of
Schoek that there is “too much crammed in between the covers” (p.xi).
The methodology requires Kantorowicz to focus on
the evolution of statements and ideas by equivalency. For example, papal
lawyers crafted the notion of corpus
mysticum et spirituale, while by equivalency, royal lawyers crafted the
notion of corpus morale et politicum.
The problem with reasoning by equivalency is that royal lawyers may be
responding intellectually to the papal lawyers, at the same time, the question
for the necessity of that rhetoric equivalency is relegated to the background:
political necessity and context play only a minor role in Kantorowicz’s
analysis; statements evolve in the context of the scholastic debates.
And yet, politics are never
truly absent. Kantorowicz’s tour de force lies in his ability to remind the
reader constantly of the importance of the historical events. In this study,
the reader is constantly reminded of the crucial importance of the Investiture
Contest (ca.1050-1180), which acted as the catalyst for the redefinition of
papal politics and royal ideologies. Kantorowicz makes only once the statement
that “that struggle itself, on the one hand dismantling the secular power of
spiritual authority ecclesiastical competency and liturgical affiliation, and,
on the other, imperializing the spiritual power, had certainly its share”
(p.90). In other words, the rhetorical rapprochement between king and pope is
the result of the pressures of a single moment in time.
The main absentee from
Kantorowicz’s analysis is not the lawyer, but the law-code. Indeed,
Kantorowicz’s concept of the law seems to encompass only political thinkers and
theorists. However, the only laws that Kantorowicz quotes are early-medieval,
ancient, or canon, and even then, the Digest
of Justinian is preferred to his Novella.
The underlying assumption with Kantorowicz’s source use is that the
interpretation of lawyers must be reflected somehow in the law codes. Kantorowicz
is aware of this objection (p.273), but yet ignores the legal documents coming
from the royal chancery. The revolution in law codes and legal collections
explode in the twelfth century,[1] and should shed light on the practical implementations
of the theological and legal arguments that took place in monasteries and
universities. Law Codes would add a layer of analysis to the argument
Faulting Kantorowicz for limited
source use is perhaps not entirely fair to the monumental intellectual labors
that went into the synthesis of so many sources, for which he was praised
(p.ix). This work is a testament to a method, to the evolution of an idea that provoked
radical changes in the understanding of royal monarchy in Europe.
The
subsequent part is not part of the original review, but rather a summary of the
class discussion that ensued.
One
aspect of the book I had only implicitly picked up on but not fully articulated
was the notion of Geistesgeschichte
(loosely translated as the history of the spirit). What is evident from
Kantorowicz’s book is the notion of the universal geist or the underlying spirit that qualifies an age. For
Kantorowicz, this geist is found
primarily in the judicial, theological and literary writings of what he
perceives as the elite, that is, Shakespeare, Dante, Aquinas and even the
Anonymous Norman. These people all articulate, in their own way, the geist of their age.
The
variations between scholars, though duly noted, are not emphasized. The primary
goal of Kantorowicz is then to demonstrate not how each scholar/writer
influenced one another, but rather to demonstrate the way in which they are
similar, even though each functioned in a different historical context. The
implication of this statement, I believe, invalidates my initial criticism that
historical context is only latent in Kantorowicz’s work primarily because the geist, for Kantorowicz, functions as a meta-historical variable.
One
point that was raised during our class discussion was whether or not this
approach to history was valid. The student objected strongly to Kantorowicz’s
methodological axiom, stating that (in the immortal words of Thucydides, “he
spoke such things”) “ideas do not simply float around.” That is, there is no geist to speak of. Scholars interact
(here perhaps indirectly influenced by the Republic of Letters), scholars talk,
scholars respond to historical circumstances.
Still,
one can wonder. Both as a respondent and a presenter at historical conferences,
I have had the pleasure (or distasteful surprise) to place and be placed into
broad philosophical currents. As the responder, I had the distinct pleasure of
arguing that political discourses of the Late-Roman Republic were understood by
the presenter as part of the Borderlands theory, even when she never uttered
those words. As a presenter, I was told that I was a deconstructionalist, even
when I only broached Derrida two years later (and I am still not done…). Does
this qualify as geist? Or do methods
of thinking simply permeate our lives so much that one can be a
deconstructionalist without having ever read anything from Derrida and his
associates? If we were to include the historical variable, could we still speak
of a geist?
[1]
Dominique Barthélémy, The Serf, the
Knight and the Historian (Cornell: Ithaca University Press, 2009).
