POLITICS AND FINITUDEwishes. Such a man sees politics as the only solution to the tragedy of his human
condition. Hobbes took over this insight.^4I shall return to the secularizing tendencies in Augustine’s thought when discussing the
proliferation and contraction of historical time within the differentcivitates. Admittedly,
out of the shifting movements of the city of God, the city of the devil, the image of the
city of God, and the image of the city of the devil—and the possible images of those
images—one concrete city emerges, thecivitas permixta, which, as Janet Coleman, follow-
ing Robert Markus’s seminal studySaeculum, argues, rightly lays claim to being secular,
historical, and temporal.^5 Branding thecivitas permixtatemporal, secular, and historical,
however, is only part of the truth, since there is more to time and history than the state
ofsaeculumwould seem to suggest. The fact that time itself simultaneously contains more
flux and more stability than thecivitas permixtaallows for reminds one of the fact that
time and history, in their ‘‘secular’’ guise, are part of a problem rather than a solution.
In order better to see the complexity of this problem, I now turn to the way in which
the medieval church and political institutions developed an alternative to the fragile fabric
of Augustine’scivitas permixta. On the one hand, Augustine can be seen as the precursor
of the (Hobbesian) model of the modern state in its intrinsically temporal guise. On
the other hand, one can detect, in the course of medieval political thought, a trend to
counterbalance the temporality of Augustine’ssaeculumwith the ‘‘mystical body,’’ the
corpus mysticum, which was to become an equally important precursor of the modern
state in the guise of a claim to permanence. Although not central to the development of
thecorpus mysticum, Augustine’s concept ofcivitasdid play a role in its establishment as
a body political. Once one of the manycivitates, thecivitas caelestis, could be isolated
from the complex of occurrences intertwined in thissaeculum, it could be identified with
theecclesia militans, the church on earth in its temporal state. Thus a kind of permanence
was taken away, so to speak, from theecclesia triumphansin heaven and bestowed on its
earthly shadow.
In hisThe King’s Two Bodies, Ernst Kantorowicz has traced early modern ideas of the
perpetuity of the state (the king never dies) back to the construct of the church as a
mystical body, which in turn could never die: ‘‘the church is incapable of non-existence:
the church never dies.’’^6 The way in which thecorpus mysticumdeveloped into a body
politic, as well as the final result, is quite extraordinary and abounds with paradoxes. In
accounting for the origins of the church as the mystical body of Christ, Kantorowicz leans
heavily on the groundbreaking study of Henri de Lubac,Corpus mysticum.^7 The long and
short of that story is that, although the church is called the body of Christ by Paul, there
was nothing mystical about that. For over a thousand years, the termmystical bodywas
the exclusive denomination of the Eucharist, without any ecclesiastical connotation.
When, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the Eucharist became at once more and
less mystical—less so because of the increasingly real and realistic presence of Christ
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