TY - JOUR
TI - The Pope’s Two Bodies: A Note on Medieval Juridical Theology
AU - Baldissone, Riccardo
TI - The Pope’s Two Bodies: A Note on Medieval Juridical Theology
AB - In the preface to his 1957 book The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology, Ernst Kantorowicz gives us an excusatio non petita for the absence of a chapter on the duplication of bodies in ecclesiastical offices. He claims that in his book ‘in an indirect fashion, the ecclesiastical side of the problem has not been neglected.’ By highlighting the need to address the ‘ecclesiastical side’ of medieval bodily duplications Kantorowicz both admits the latter’s importance and risks obscuring its genealogical priority over its ‘secular’ counterpart. The task of this note is to underline the priority of ‘ecclesiastical’ over ‘secular’ medieval duplications, to rescue both of them from the retrospective projection of the Schmittian notion of political theology, and to recontextualize their historical cultural milieu as juridical theology. Such a recontextualization may allow us to throw some light on a vastly unappreciated theoretical watershed in European culture.
VL - 2024
IS - 1/2024
PY - 2024
SP - 49
EP - 86
UR - https://ejournals.eu/en/journal/exceptions/article/the-popes-two-bodies-a-note-on-medieval-juridical-theology
KW - political theology
KW - ecclesiology
KW - juridical theology
KW - Christianity