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HENT DE VRIES

this dual aspect of ideality and practicality, that is to say, of ‘‘two bodies,’’ whose mutual
exclusionandaccommodation istheologico-political, since no strictly humanly finite or
naturalist reasoning, let alone any mechanistic principle or rule-governed pattern, can
account for the paradoxical logic of its operation.
Insight into the fragility and contestability of the theologico-political is amplified
during the period of the Reformation and the emerging modern world that it expresses
as much as announces. Its implications can now be methodically studiedandenacted at
the linguistic level, where a specific speech act—namely, that of insult—comes to exem-
plify and dramatize the earlier paradox, as the ontological or ontico-theological difficulty
discussed by Kantorowicz becomes the predicament of public speech. Drawing on a 1531
pamphlet of Martin Luther’s in which, with typical vehemence, he states: ‘‘ ‘Hallowed be
Thy name’... Cursed, damned, and outraged be the papacy together with all earthly
kingdoms that are against your kingdom,’ ’’ Szabari elaborates a remarkable theology of
offense and scandal that, she demonstrates, at once presupposes and contests existing
ecclesial traditions, canons, and procedures regarding blasphemy and anathema. Luther
is stretching the limits of blame set by these conventions, and, in so doing, he inaugurates
a different way of symbolic world making.
Paradoxically, Szabari observes, Luther’s ‘‘extreme rudeness,’’ based on a decidedly
biblical war cry, reveals a significant feature of the role that religious speech, during the
Reformation and thereafter, acquires in the emerging modern public sphere. She argues
that Luther’s masterly move is that of satire and a strategic turning of tables. Indeed,
Luther’s cunning reasoning implies ‘‘that what was conventionally accepted as pious lan-
guage is in fact blasphemy and that what appeared to be blasphemy is in fact true piety.’’
This move not only redirects theological discourse and expands the customary boundaries
of rhetorical language but, more significantly, subverts political hegemonies by way of
social exclusion or ostracism.
Szabari demonstrates that, unlike his contemporary, the Humanist Desiderius Eras-
mus, in his invective Luther exploits the limits of classical rhetoric as it stylizes language
and thus achieves a distinctively modern form of its public impact. Luther’s ‘‘theology of
the performative,’’ Szabari maintains, does not primarily reform the propositions of scho-
lastic theology but is much more dynamic in that it takes words (themodus loquendi,as
Michel de Certeau said) to be agents (and hence speaking as amodus agendi), ‘‘not as
magic words that produce static substances but as essentially social and intersubjective
events’’ (p. 127). As such, Szabari adds, it is also attuned to a modern articulation of the
insight that divine speech is essentially iterable, especially in the ‘‘reproducibility and
variability of printed type’’ (p. 127).
In a preliminary way, we might assess the results of our inquiry so far by saying that
the ancient, medieval, and modern concept of political sovereignty and authority in city,
state, empire, and nation, whatever the discursive and rhetorical modes of its immanent,
earthly, and lay theoretical justification—which may well include a magical-mythological

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