CLAUDE LEFORTcommunitas,patria,perpetuitas, andaevum(a notion intermediate between that of time
and that of eternity) are reworked to represent, in their respective registers, a new rela-
tionship between theparticular, which is still inscribed within the limits of a body, of an
entity that is organized spatially and temporally, and theuniversal, which is still related
to the operation of transcendence. The ideas of reason, justice, and right, which inspire
both a return to the principles of classical thought and a movement toward a secularized
ethic, are themselves caught up in a theologico-political elaboration. The prince (and we
have already alluded to this event) comes to occupy the position of the mediator between
Justice and his subjects; the old Roman definition of the emperor as being at once above
the laws and subject to Law is modified to put him in that position; he appears to be both
his own superior and his own inferior; grace makes him divine, but his nature makes him
human. He both institutes and reveals justice, and is both its vicar and its image within
the state—and, symmetrically, Justice, like Christ, becomes an object of worship, and
insinuates itself into a position in which it can mediate between sovereign reason and
equity, between a substitute for divine law and a substitute for human law.
Particular attention should be paid to the series of divisions that accompanies and
sustains the representation of bodies, a representation that was originally inspired by the
model of Christ. Not only can they be substituted for one another, they support one
another. The principle of the schema is, let me repeat, established when a new kind of
royalty is instituted by the rite of coronation. As Marc Bloch demonstrates, we are now
in the presence of a complex phenomenon that calls into question both the status of
temporal power and the status of spiritual power...^4 When the king is blessed and
crowned as the Lord’s anointed, his power is spiritualized, but, although he is the earthly
replica of Christ, he differs from his model in that, while grace makes him divine, his
nature makes him human. It is not simply that he cannot truly take the place of the sacred
one (and no doubt no one has ever been able to do so), it is also that his person makes
visible both the union of natural and supernatural, and the division between them. De-
spite the attempts made by the Othonian emperors, the path to a complete identification
with a God-made-man remains blocked. At the same time, the king comes up against
another earthly force: the priest, from whose hands he receives his rank, and who is in a
position to claim to be his superior. The division of the body of the king therefore goes
hand in hand with the division between royal (or imperial) and papal authority. What
happens at the latter pole is equally significant, for the claim that the pope is superior to
any temporal power is bound up with his ambition to imprint his own spiritual power
on a territory. In that respect, it should be recalled that the circumstances surrounding
the pact signed between Pe ́pin le Bref and Etienne II—the first pact between a pope and
a king—are not anecdotal; they have a symbolic significance. Pe ́pin converts his father’s
bid for power into an act of usurpation: he asks the Church to establish the basis of his
legitimacy. Etienne, for his part, tries to enlist the king’s help in seizing the Exarchate of
Ravenna by exploiting a forged document—the so-called Donation of Constantine, which
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