Ernst Kantorowicz

Ernst Hartwig Kantorowicz (May 3, 1895 – September 9, 1963) was a Jewish German historian of medieval political and intellectual history and art, known for his 1927 book Kaiser Friedrich der Zweite on Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, and The King's Two Bodies (1957) on medieval and early modern ideologies of monarchy and the state. He was an elected member of both the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (1957)

 * The fascination emanating as usual from the historical material itself prevailed over any desire of practical or moral application and, needless to say, preceded any afterthought.


 * The antithesis served the Anonymous, it is true, to observe very strictly the inherent difference between the God and the king; but it served him also to blur that line of distinction and to show where the difference between "God by nature" and "god by grace" ended; that is, in the case of potestas, of power. Essence and substance of power are claimed to be equal in both God and king, no matter whether that power be owned by nature or only acquired by grace.


 * That the phrase actually originated in the Hispana is obvious for a simple reason: only in that collection do we find a textual corruption of the acts of the Council of Chalcedon at which one of the bishops modestly said that God imperatorem erexit ad zelum [i.e. fidei]. In other words, a scribe copying the canons of Chalcedon misread the text and changed ad zelum into ad celum; and this erroneous reading must have reached, perhaps through the channels of Pseudo-Isidorus, the Norman Anonymous for whom even that great forgery in favor of the hierarchy could turn into grist brought to his royalist mill. This reading is merely an error, though an error remarkable by itself, since it shows how easily any extravagant exaltation of the imperial power could flow from the pen of a scribe in those centuries.


 * It appears relevant to the general subject of this study, and also otherwise worth our while, to inspect more closely the varieties of royal duplications which Shakespeare has unfolded in the three bewildering central scenes of Richard II. The duplications, all one, and all simultaneously active, in Richard — "Thus play I in one person many people" (V. v.31) — are those potentially present in the King, the Fool, and the God. They dissolve, perforce, in the Mirror. Those three prototypes of "twin-birth" intersect and overlap and interfere with each other continuously.


 * The jurists had claimed that the king's body politic is utterly void of "natural Defects and Imbecilities." Here, however, "Imbecility" seems to hold sway. And yet, the very bottom has not been reached. Each scene, progressively, designates a new low. "King body natural" in the first scene, and "Kingly Fool" in the second: with those two twin-born beings there is associated, in the half-sacramental abdication scene, the twin-born deity as an even lower estate. For the "Fool" marks the transition from "King" to "God," and nothing could be more miserable, it seems, than the God in the wretchedness of man.


 * Over against his lost outward kingship he sets an inner kingship, makes his true kingship to retire to inner man, to soul and mind and "regal thoughts": You may my glories and my state depose, But not my briefs, still am I king of those. (IV.i.192ff)


 * The features as reflected by the looking-glass betray that he is stripped of every possibility of a second or super-body — of the pompous body politic of king, of the God-likeness of the Lord's deputy elect, of the follies of the fool, and even of the most human griefs residing in inner man. The splintering mirror means, or is, the breaking part of any possible duality. All those facets are reduced to one: to the banal face and insignificant physis of a miserable man, a physis now void of any metaphysis whatsoever. It is both less and more than Death. It is the demise of Richard and the rise of a new body natural.


 * A hundred years or more of Christ-centered monastic piety have affected also the image of rulership. In fact, the unique Reichenau miniature is the most powerful pictorial display of what may be called "liturgical kingship" — a kingship centered in the God-man rather than in God the Father. As a result, the Reichenau artist ventured to transfer the Ottonian emperor also the God-man's "two natures in one person.


 * In late antique art, we often find the halo bestowed on such figures as might impersonate a supra-individual idea or general notion. This special mark of distinction indicated that the figure was meant to represent in every respect a continuum, something permanent and sempiternal beyond the contingencies of time and corruption.


 * In other words, whenever we capitalize a notion and, in the English language, even change the gender from neuter to feminine, we actually are "haloing" the word or the notion and are indicating its sempiternity as an idea or power.