| Abstract | The meaning of the body politic (later, social body) metaphor was at once ambivalent and clear: the state is an organic whole whose parts cannot stand in isolation. Insofar as the analogy distinguished the state from the physical body of its ruler, it could lead to a level of the highest abstraction, as in Aristotle's famous remark that the polis "is prior in nature to the household and to each of us individually. For the whole must necessarily be prior to the part: since when the whole body is destroyed, foot or hand would not exist except in an equivocal sense, like in the sense in which one speaks of a hand sculptured in stone as a hand."(7) But notwithstanding Aristotle's immense authority, the medieval doctrine of the continuity of the state beyond the king's death had a different origin. This is one of the paradoxes explored by [Ernst H. Kantorowicz] in his great book The King's Two Bodies. Although the body politic metaphor received an additional Christian legitimation by the (ultimately related) notion of corpus mysticum, the idea of the king's two bodies was, according to Kantorowicz, utterly alien to Greek and Roman antiquity: it was "an offshoot of Christian theological thought and consequently stands as a landmark of Christian political theology."(8) This sentence, which closes the book, aptly evokes its subtitle, A Study in Medieval Political Theology, as well as its inspirer, Carl Schmitt. Kantorowicz never mentions Schmitt but explicitly states that the aim of his research has been to "investigate...the emergence of some of the idols of modern political religions" -- the idols of nationalism to which he had sacrificed in his youth.(9) In a crucial chapter Kantorowicz explores the idea of "dying for one's fatherland" (pro patria mori) as a symptom of what he called "the new patriotism." In Greek and Roman antiquity words such as patris or patria acquired a religious, universal meaning: the true patria was Paradise. From the twelfth and thirteenth centuries "regnum as patria" became -- first in France and later in all the great monarchies -- "an object of political devotion and semi-religious emotion": a "re-secularized offshoot of the Christian tradition."(10) Ultimately, "the idea of the corpus mysticum was...transferred and applied to the political entities" by using either ecclesiological designations or "more specific equivalents such as the Aristotelian notion of corpus morale et politicum or the more emotional patria."(11) The abstractions of political theology are certainly related to the "semireligious emotion" evoked by Kantorowicz, but they are incapable of explaining it. For Aristotle, the polis was a whole and therefore, from a gender point of view, a neuter (to holon). Conversely, both parris and patria seem to echo the contradictory gender roles as well as the emotional connotations (father, mother, brother) which Kilamuwa, king of [Sam]'al, proudly claimed for himself c. 830 B.C.E. Is the body politic of modern political religions, therefore, a gendered body?
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