M. B. PRANGER(being calledcorpus verumrather thancorpus mysticum), and more so because of the
increasingly miraculous nature of real presence, culminating in the doctrine of ‘‘transub-
stantiation’’—the mystical part was transferred to the sole possessor and executor of this
mysterious sacrament, the church. A second extraordinary feature of this story is the fact
thatcorpus mysticumas designation of the church, in spite of its mystical ring, came to
symbolize the church in its longitudinal, organizational shape (the pope as the head),
without any mystical connotation other than the perpetuity of the institution guaranteed
by its head. Kantorowicz sums up these developments succinctly: ‘‘Whereas thecorpus
verum, through the agency of the dogma of the transubstantiation and the institution of
the feast ofCorpus Christi, developed a life and mysticism of its own, thecorpus mysticum
proper came to be less and less mystical as time passed on, and came to mean simply the
Church as a body politic or, by transference, any body politic of the secular world.’’^8
One may wonder whether it is this empty ‘‘mystical’’/‘‘nonmystical,’’ organizational
preeminence of the church as keeper of eternity’s mysteries that has guaranteed its sur-
vival up to the present day. If so, that would shed light on the image of the church as
ecclesia triumphans, so popular in the Baroque period, in a seamless—and, it should be
added, bizarre—embrace of heaven and earth. Transferred and applied to the state, the
notion of thecorpus mysticumcould also shed light on the equally dubious nature of the
triumphant ‘‘king who never dies.’’
Unsurprisingly, Kantorowicz, in order to underpin the longevity of institutions, tries
to detect a category of temporality that would do justice to both the temporal and the
supra-temporal nature of the mystical body. Having found such a notion in the scholastic
concept ofaevumas the go-between between eternity and time proper, he attempts to
supplement Augustine’s ‘‘forcefully simplifying dualism’’ between time and eternity with
‘‘a kind of infiniteness and duration which had motion and therefore past and future, a
sempiternity which according to all authorities was endless.’’^9 The introduction ofaevum
does not show Kantorowicz at his strongest, if only because there is no shred of evidence
for any relation between an ongoing discussion about time and eternity, in particular the
eternity of the world, by the scholastic left, on the one hand, and reflections about institu-
tional and political time, on the other. Yet even if the clever though fanciful notion of
angelic time (aevumbeing associated with the time of the angels) is taken out of the
description of institutions, it testifies to our embarrassment with regard to the problem
of time as such, an embarrassment once so eloquently phrased by Augustine in his famous
exclamation that we know what time is so long as no one asks us about it, whereas we
must admit to being utterly ignorant the moment we try to answer that question.
What we have so far is twofold. On the one hand,saeculumas the state in which
‘‘those two cities are interwoven and intermixed’’ may offer real temporality, albeit at the
cost of fixity.^10 On the other hand, we have seen the institutions of both church and state
emerge out of this entanglement as hypostatized into a continuity of sorts. Roughly speak-
ing, longevity was granted to thepersonaeof church and state through a kind of idealiza-
PAGE 116116.................16224$ $CH3 10-13-06 12:34:20 PS