The Mercenary Mediterranean_ Sovereignty, Religion, and Violence in the Medieval Crown of Aragon - Hussein Fancy

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part of wider disputes about the liberal values — above all, toleration —

helps to bring the challenge of resolving them into full view.

Political Theology

The enemy of liberalism had another name: political theology. Although it

has a longer history, this expression is now associated with Carl Schmitt’s

slim and gnomic text, Politische Theologie, which claimed, “All significant

concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological con-

cepts.”^26 In short, all politics derives from religion. A Catholic conserva-

tive and Nazi jurist, Schmitt believed that a liberal faith in secularism was

flawed. Politics, he contended, can never divorce itself from religion, by

which he meant its nonrational and transcendental foundation. Invoking

the very same medieval legal traditions discussed in the chapters above,

Schmitt argued that an authority that creates and sustains the law can

never be fully included within the law; it logically stands prior to and out-

side of it. Political sovereignty, like divine sovereignty, he wrote, is funda-

mentally an exception to the order it creates. Thus, Schmitt saw the liberal

ideal of separating religion from politics as impossible and naïve. Reviving

the work of nineteenth- century Catholic counterrevolutionaries like Bon-

ald and Maistre, he called for a redivinization of politics, a restoration of its

religious and moral basis, and a return to an idealized synthesis of politics

and theology, which he identified with the Catholic Middle Ages.^27 It is

significant to underscore that this definition of sovereignty depended upon

a certain periodization, a claim about what came before “the modern.”

Schmitt’s secular and liberal opponents defended the “legitimacy of

the modern age” against what they saw as the rising threat of political re-

ligion.^28 Among them, it is worth highlighting the medievalist Ernst Kan-

torowicz, whose King’s Two Bodies leaves a heavy impression on the pages

above. Written after Kantorowicz’s emigration to the United States in

1957 , this book should be read as an apology for his first, an eccentric bi-

ography of the Hohenstaufen emperor Frederick II.^29 In that earlier work,

Kantorowicz emphasized the near messianic quality of the German ruler,

who, like the myth of the Last World Emperor, had united political and

spiritual authority in one figure. Göring, Goebbels, and Hitler lauded the

work as a celebration of the German national spirit, prompting some to

call the biography a “fascist classic.”^30 In The King’s Two Bodies, how-

ever, Kantorowicz sought to place Frederick— or more precisely, the