THE THEOLOGICO-POLITICAL?surrenders Rome’s possessions into his hands. A doable fraud is thus covered up by a new
combination of religious law and human law. The new formation is indeed theologico-
political through and through, by which I mean that it is determined by a double struggle
for power. It is, however, even more important to note that we can from the outset
discern two simultaneous movements toward a universal authority that is both scriptural
and temporal. But neither can be carried through to completion: unrestricted political
domination is impossible, and so is the creation of a theocratic monarchy.
The fragmentation of authority that is characteristic of feudal organization, by con-
trast, has the result of outlining the position of a king who, within the framework of a
limited territory, appears to have no superiors—that is, no temporal superiors—and who
is defined as being an emperor within his own kingdom (imperator in suo regno). And it
is at the very moment when this claim is being so clearly asserted—in, that is, the mid-
thirteenth century in both France and England—that the monarchical configuration be-
gins to be deployed in its Western singularity.
The work of inscribing power and laws within a territory, the delineation of a political
society with definite frontiers, and the winning, within that space, of the allegiance of all
to the authority of the king are accompanied by the process of the sanctification and
spiritualization of the kingdom. The process of secularization and laicization, which tends
to deprive the Church of its temporal power within the framework of the state and which
tends to include the national clergy within the community of the kingdom, is paralleled
by the process of the incorporation of those religious representations that are capable of
investing a ‘‘natural’’ space and social institutions with a mystical signification. Through-
out the fabric of society, a division is effected between the realm of the functional and the
realm of the mystical, though, given that it is revealed in terms of that representation, it
would be more accurate to speak of it being effected throughout the fabric of thebody
politic. The division of the body politic occurs together with the division of the king’s
body; at the same time, the body politic is part of his body; his immortal and supernatural
body remains that of a person whom race makes divine and in whom God dwells but, at
the same time, it migrates into the body of the kingdom; while a single body is defined
both as the body of a person and as the body of a community, its head remains the
symbol of a transcendence that can never be effaced. Thus, in the famous essays he devotes
to the reign of Philippe le Bel, Joseph Strayer shows how the conquest of the unity of
political society under the slogan ‘‘defense of the kingdom’’ succeeds in mobilizing reli-
gious affects—the defense of the kingdom is a continuation of the defense of the kingdom
of Christ; a feeling for the earthly fatherland replaces a feeling for the heavenly fatherland;
the warriors who sacrifice their lives become brothers to the crusaders who fell in order
to deliver Jerusalem and who were promised to the glory of God.^5 The historian reveals
how the figure of the warrior king becomes that of the Most Christian King, just as the
territory is transformed into aholy land, and the mass of subjects into a chosen people
(see his essay ‘‘The Most Christian Country, the Chosen People, and the Holy Land’’). It
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