'The King’s Two Bodies as Lamentation' by Karl Shoemaker in (2017) 13(1)
Law, Culture and the Humanities 25 comments
The King’s Two Bodies is, as has long been recognized, a genealogy of modern state power. But it is also something else less clearly recognized. The King’s Two Bodies is a lamentation. In Kantorowicz’s poignant eulogy, the sovereign that medieval lawyers had made in the imago dei, was revealed at last to be an idol. Profound reverence for the rule of law crumbled into absent- minded legality. The lawful sovereign became diabolical power, forever deciding exceptions but incapable of justice or grace. In The King’s Two Bodies, Kantorowicz mournfully shows how the death and tragic afterlife of a particular medieval concept of sovereignty helped to make possible the horrors of modern political absolutism and state idolatry.
Shoemaker argues
The King’s Two Bodies is a lamentation. The book is of course better recognized as Ernst Kantorowicz’s careful excavation of the medieval sources upon which once stood the Tudor constitutional doctrine that English kings had both a corporal body that would suf- fer infirmity and death and a political body that could not. The clichéd acclamation – “The king is dead! Long live the king!” – turns out to distill a complex medieval solution to the sovereign’s ambiguous relationship to law and to time. Kantorowicz famously showed that the early-modern English doctrine of twin-bodied kingship rested upon the doctrines of medieval lawyers who were attempting to discern the limits suggested by classical Roman law upon the exercise of sovereign power and to reconcile those limits with Christian theological accounts of a Christ-like king ordained by God to rule. In so doing, Kantorowicz showed that English law owed an intellectual debt to medieval Roman law (a claim that is less controversial today than it was when he made it) and that medieval Christian theology served as a midwife for modern concepts of state sovereignty. But alongside this well-known thesis, Kantorowicz offered another less recognized story – a story of sorrow, disenchantment, and loss.
Suffering the fate of all historically commanding attempts to reconcile law with power, the medieval doctrine of the king’s two bodies eventually collapsed under the weight of its own necessary absurdities. Frederick Maitland had already turned his wit so devastatingly upon the doctrine that Kantorowicz recounted the great historian’s jibes in the opening pages of his own study in order to inoculate against them. The doctrine of two bodies “parsonified” the king, Maitland had quipped. He wryly called it “metaphysiological nonsense.” With a tinge of impish glee, Maitland described how in 1715 peasants subject to a rebellious baron celebrated when their baron’s land was forfeited to the crown. Since, unlike their baronial lord, the king could never die, the peasants shrewdly deduced that the customary taxes paid upon their landlord’s death would never come due again. Or so they thought. After careful examination of the king’s two bodies, Parliament determined that the peasants’ obligation was owed to the king’s mortal body, not his immortal one. Thus, like death, the tax remained certain. At any rate, such were the legal issues that might arise from merging a man made by an eternal God with an eternal King made by man.
Kantorowicz himself admitted that the temptation “to ridicule the theory of the King’s Two Bodies is indeed great when you read, without being prepared for it, the at once fantastic and subtle description of the king’s superbody” contained in Blackstone. When Blackstone listed the attributes of kingship still recognized by English law in the eighteenth century he was able to recite them without any seeming embarrassment. The king “is invisible” and “always present,” he soberly explained. But even in Blackstone’s age such an account of an extra-corporal, unseen, and omnipresent king was losing its persuasive power. By the nineteenth century, having outlived the historical circumstances that rendered it intelligible, the aged doctrine limped along as an object of ridicule and scorn. But Kantorowicz understood, as Maitland surely had, that behind these “physiologically amusing traits” stood an account of sovereignty that had once framed the relationship between law and power in the major European legal traditions and had provided the jurisprudential foundations of the modern state. The King’s Two Bodies is, as has long been recognized, a genealogy of modern state power. But it is also something else. It is a somber obituary. Perhaps better, the text is a delicately embroidered sheet draped respectfully by Kantorowicz over the naked, lifeless body of the medieval sovereign. Or rather, over a particular medieval concept of sovereignty – a concept whose death and tragic afterlife, in Kantorowicz’s telling, made possible the horrors of modern political absolutism and state idolatry. ...
Kantorowicz may not have grappled with the question of sovereign absolutism directly, but the problem casts a shadow on every chapter of the book. Indeed, The King’s Two Bodies can be read as a history of the doomed effort of medieval jurists to erect a jurisprudence in which the sovereign was sufficiently powerful and just to bind itself to its own law.
As we will see, however, by 1957 Kantorowicz had also come to realize that the medieval lawyers he esteemed so much, rather than providing the grounds by which sovereign power could be bound to law, had actually dug the footers into which the foundation of modern legal positivism would be poured. From Kantorowicz’s viewpoint, the sovereign that medieval lawyers had made in the imago dei, was revealed to be an idol. Profound reverence for the rule of law had crumbled into absent-minded legality. The lawful sovereign had become diabolical power, forever deciding exceptions but incapable of justice or grace. Kantorowicz was not inattentive to absolutism. He was disgusted and horrified by it, though his horror and disgust is expressed mostly by the despair threading quietly through The King’s Two Bodies.
