146 epilogue
exceptional or dual nature of medieval kingship — within a longer narra-
tive of the relationship between politics and religion:
Taken all by itself, this transference of definitions from one sphere to another,
from theology to law, is anything but surprising or even remarkable. The
quid pro quo method — the taking over of theological notions for defining the
state — had been going on for many centuries, just as, vice versa, in the early
centuries of the Christian era the imperial political terminology and the impe-
rial ceremonial had been adapted to the needs of the Church.^31
As Roman imperial metaphors informed early Christological debates —
the problem of Christ’s humanity and divinity — so religious metaphors
were in turn later adapted to answer political questions — the problem
of the body politic. For Kantorowicz, this formal borrowing, a quid pro
quo, did not reveal the religious origin of politics but rather the essential
and necessary fiction at the heart of all politics.^32 Politics and religion sim-
ply met in the Middle Ages, like two cars weaving at an interchange, shar-
ing a path briefly before diverging again. The convergence, however, was
serendipitous: the language used to solve the riddle of Christ’s two natures
was also employed to justify representation, constitutionalism, and hu-
manism. In this narration, secular liberalism proceeded from rather than
against religion, as a fragile but admirable art of politics. The King ’s Two
Bodies was a defense of secular modernity against the Middle Ages.
Although Schmitt and Kantorowicz represent only two of the variety
of positions taken during the political- theological debates by Protestant,
Jewish, and Islamic thinkers, they demonstrate that the polemics over
convivencia between Catholic conservatives and secular liberals in Spain
were part of a larger contemporary discussion about the relationship of
politics and religion that was mediated through the medieval past.^33 Across
Europe, liberals hoped to cure modernity of the ills of religion, and con-
servatives hoped to cure religion of the ills of modernity, understood as
cold and excessive rationalism, a falling away from an idealized medieval
past. These two essential positions were hopelessly locked.
Recently, Peter Eli Gordon has suggested that rather than seeing these
debates as allegories of war and crisis, the political- theological debates
should be seen as fundamentally philosophical disputes.^34 For Gordon,
these debates were reprisals of the deeper tension between Enlightenment
and Counter- Enlightenment, which is to say, the tension between ratio-
nalism and irrationalism, universalism and relativism, transcendentalism
and hermeneutics. These remain the essential debates of modern philoso-
