The myth of the State and the body of the King

Abstract

In the Middle Ages, political theology was based, according to Kantorowicz, on the idea that the king had two bodies: one political and one natural. The second one was corruptible and subject to degeneration and passing of time. The other was the one where the political power was supported. This body passed over time and space, justifying a particular government, the monarchy. The King’s two bodies were illustrated in something that we could call “King’s tragic germination” and it was represented by Shakespeare in one of his most famous tragedies: the tragedy of King Richard II. That tradition of the Occidental Christianity, the tradition of the corporative State in which the State is a body and the head is Christ, has been crawled since the Patristic period, after by Saint Thomas and then for Dante, to conclude in the political thought of Thomas Hobbes (included-excluded). The analysis and critical revision of the concepts of that political theology will be used as a clue to understand and interpret the modernity and the current political events. The modern State wasn’t built in confrontation with the Medieval State, but there is a formal and systematic continuity as Carl Schmitt has intended to clarify in his texts.