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ABSTRACT
In his book Le portrait du roi, Louis Marin seems to continue Ernst Kantorowicz’s work on the Middle Ages, extending it to Early Modernity. Marin’s book adds another body to the historical and juridical political bodies of Kantorowicz’s King described in The Two King’s Bodies, namely the portrait of the King. According to Marin, this body drives the interchange between the historical and juridical bodies; hence, the absolutist king has three bodies in one: the historical, the semiotic-sacramental, and the juridical. Following Kantorowicz and Marin’s argumentative line, this paper addresses the ways in which absent or dead bodies can act politically, in particular, the shift in political legitimation that goes hand in hand with the transition from a politics of relics to a politics of images.
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Notes
1 Marin, Le portrait du roi, 20.
2 Vickers in “Analogy Versus Identity,” attributes this kind of transaction between words and things to the occultism, as opposed to the scientific way of thinking. He does not, however, distinguish this way of thinking from the strictly sacramental way of thinking, which understands this type of transaction as something exceptional that occurs in the miracle, but which does not operate in the rest of natural reality and is therefore compatible with scientific thinking. I owe the remark on Vickers to Robert Yelle.
3 Marin, Le portrait du roi, 10.
4 There is no doubt that this shift has to do with the interpretation of transubstantiation as symbolization by the theological currents of the reformation and in particular by Zwingli. They set the semiotic turn in motion. I owe this remark to Robert Yelle.
5 A theological explanation of the church of martyrs and saints is the text by Erik Peterson, “Witness to the Truth,” in Theological Tractates, 151–81.
6 Beyond Bozóky see also: Geary, “Sacred Commodities”; Geary, Furta Sacra; Schramm, Herrschaftszeichen und Staatssymbolik; Herrmann-Mascard, Les reliques des saints; Rollason, Saints and Relics in Aglo-Saxon England; and Geary, Le vol des reliques.
7 Bozóky, La politique des reliques, 10–12.
8 See Rebillard, Religion et sepulture; Brown, The Ransom of the Soul. And in particular Angenendt, Heilige und Reliquien.
9 Gregor of Nazianz’s Contra Iulianum I, 59, PG 35, col. 589.
10 Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechesis XVIII, 16, PG 33, col. 1038. See also: John of Damascus, An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, 368–69: “In the Law, anyone who touched a corpse was accounted unclean. But these of whom we speak [i.e., the saints] are not dead. Because life itself and the author of life was reckoned amongst the dead, we do not call these dead who have fallen asleep in the hope of resurrection and in the faith in Him. For how can a dead body work miracles?”
11 Hilary of Poitiers, Contra Constantinum Imperatorem § 8 PL 10, col. 583-584.
12 Victricius of Rouen, De laude sanctorum, 11.
13 Augustin of Hypo, City of God, XXII, 9. See also Marrou, “Le dogme de la resurrection” and Miles, Augustine on the Body.
14 Aquinas, S Th III, Supl. Q 78, 3.
15 Brown, The Cult of the Saints, 69–86.
16 Brown, The Cult of the Saints, 86–106.
17 The nimbus or aura in Christian art first appeared in the fifth century. The origin of the halo, however, goes back a few centuries earlier, to pre-Christian Hellenistic art. It can also be seen in depictions of gods and kings during the Persian Empire, as well as in most depictions of the Buddha in Greco-Buddhist art of the first century BC. Its use from Hellenistic Egyptian and Greek art extends into the early Roman Empire. Examples of the use of the nimbus in this context are seen on the reverse of Roman coins, with depictions of Trajan (Arch of Constantine) and Antoninus Pius. Several Roman emperors were frequently depicted wearing a radiant crown, whose rays were intended to illustrate those coming from the sun.
18 Jaeger, “Aura and Charisma,” 34.
19 In the Middle Ages, that idea was not particularly strange since that force could also be found in gemstones, medicinal plants, and incantations. By the way, the place of the afterlife was a disputed question in the Middle Ages between superstition and the question of the returnees, both ancient pre-Christian beliefs. Christian pastoral teaching on death had indeed to clarify the power of life after death. The work of Jean-Claude Schmitt is interesting in this respect. In particular, Schmitt, Ghosts in the Middle Ages and Schmitt, Les superstitions.
20 Walsham, Relics and Remains, 12.
21 See in particular Yurchak, “Re-touching the Sovereign.”
22 From an article in The Guardian, 10/06/2006: Hand of John the Baptist in Russia: “As part of the Kremlin’s bid to forge a national identity, John the Baptist's right hand, which Christians think Jesus Christ, has returned to Russia for the first time in 89 years. The return has been hailed by the Russian Orthodox church with great pomp and reverence. The head of the church, Patriarch Alexei II, welcomed it at a ceremony on Wednesday at the Church of Christ the Saviour in central Moscow. The hand will remain there until Friday, when it will be taken on a tour of Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine before returning in July to Montenegro, its present home. The Patriarch called on Christians to pray before the hand, according to the state news agency RIA Novosti. The relic’s return to Moscow is part of an orchestrated revival of the church, which is playing a central role in giving Russians a sense of spiritual and national belonging. The move was financed by a religious foundation chaired by Vladimir Yakunin, the head of Russia’s vast state railways network who is frequently referred to as a potential successor to President Vladimir Putin.”
23 See Gil, Fate of the Flesh. The central claim of the book is that the ancient hope for the resurrection of the body was not even completely forgotten in seventeenth century thanks to the countersecular movement of poetry that advocate for an immanent resurrection of the flesh. In his view, this ancient counterdiscourse remains today for example in contemporary zombie culture. I owe this remark to Jennifer Rust.
24 Gil, Fate of the Flesh, IX–X and 17–19.
25 See Schmitt, Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes and Schmitt, “Der Staat als Mechanismus.”
26 Hobbes, Leviathan, chapters XVII–XVIII.
27 Jaeger, Enchantment, 122: “imitation depends on illusion: when the viewer accepts the painted or sculpted object as real, when the viewer enters into the world represented, he or she is roused to imitation, because the greatness of that world, or its charge of magic or sanctity, or promise of consolation, is so appealing. It works its paideic effect by showing us how minor we are and how high we can rise. The illusion powerful enough to dissolve its own illusory character and lift the viewer into ‘heightened’ world, accepted as real, is the prerequisite of imitation.”
28 See the comment of Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign I, 288 ff.
29 Marin, Le portrait du roi, 106
30 Burke, The Fabrication of Louis XIV, Preface.
31 Burke, The Fabrication of Louis XIV, 9.
32 Burke, The Fabrication of Louis XIV, 7.
33 In the eighth century, specifically in 726, the iconoclastic controversy broke out, prompting Emperor Leo III of Constantinople to forcibly remove the icon of Christ from the door of the imperial palace in Constantinople. Under the reign of Constantine V (741–775) iconoclasm became such a powerful movement that it received ecclesiastical confirmation by a synod of 338 bishops in 754. The cult of images was later restored at the second Council of Nicaea in 787. The struggle against images, in good faith, was a struggle for the restitution of the “true” religion threatened by paganism. The new religion had to be in spirit and truth. Christianity had to be defended against idolatry. It was valid for the iconoclasts to venerate the cross, but not the icon. The cross is a relic, not an image. The image of Christ was at the center of the controversy. For the iconoclasts, Christ, although incarnated and having a human face, would have assumed human nature in general, not an individual human being. Therefore, Christ’s humanity, in their view, would be “un-circumscribable.” On the other hand, the assumption of the flesh, would lead to a double personality in Christ, divine, and human, and, in any case, it would be the human face, the possibly representable one. These were two of the strongest arguments of the iconoclasts. The complete dispute can be seen in Schönborn, God’s Human Face.
34 Bredekamp, Image Acts, 138.
35 Jaeger, Enchantment, 103.
36 See Belting, Bild und Kult, 60–91. He explains how icons were distinguished from mere artifacts, that is, from something merely manufactured. Hence, the distance between the icon and the artistic portrait. In particular to understand the closeness of the icon to the relic, more than to the portrait, the following paragraph is interesting: “Damit stoßen wir auf ein Indiz für die frühe Geltung des Bilders. Diese wird Äquivalent der Reliquie. Augustinus spricht noch abwertend von den Heiden als den Anbetern von Bilden und Gräbern (adoratores imaginum et sepulcrorum). Der Gräber- und Bilderkult wird aber bald zum Kennzeichnen der Christenheit. Die Faszination, die vom Grabe eines Heiligen ausging, wurde auf Bilder übertragen. (…) Das Bild, in Dinglichkeit und Echtheitsbeweis, erbt die Funktionsmerkmale der Reliquie. Es wird Gefäß eines höchst realen Präsenz der Heiligen.” Belting, Bild und Kult, 72.
37 Jaeger, Enchantment, 99.
38 Jaeger, Enchantment, 122–3. Although Jaeger precedes this article in imagining the relationships between relic, icon, aura, and charisma; and this article connects with Jaeger’s association of concepts in several respects, the same meanings are not used here for those signifiers. As shown throughout these pages, this article characterizes the acting power of relics in a different way than Jaeger does, since for him relic implies abstraction, absence, and evocation. Here, however, I focus on its aspect of existentiality, transformation, and presence, something he attributes rather to icons.
39 Hansen, “Benjamin’s Aura,” 361–70.
40 Benjamin, “Protocols of Drug Experiments,” 58. He perhaps refers to Auguste Marques’s book, The Human Aura.
41 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 447: “Trace and aura. The trace is the appearance of a nearness, however far removed the thing that left it behind maybe. The aura is the appearance of a distance, however close the thing that calls it forth. In the trace, we gain possession of the thing; in the aura, it takes possession of us.”
42 Hansen, “Benjamin’s Aura,” 370: “One strategy of preserving the potentiality of aura, of being able to introduce the concept in the first place, was to place it under erasure, to mark it as constitutively belated and irreversibly moribund; in other words, Benjamin had to kill the term, mortify and blast it to pieces, before he could use it at all. The other strategy was to abandon the term altogether and use the demolished fragments of auratic perception in other concepts, in particular the mimetic faculty and the optical unconscious.”
43 Scholem, On the Mystical Shape of the God Head, 251, 270, 254, 255.
44 Benjamin, “The Work of Art,” 254.
45 Benjamin, “The Work of Art,” 254. “We define the aura [of natural objects] as the unique apparition of a distance, however near it may be. To follow with the eye—while resting on a summer afternoon—a mountain range on the horizon or a branch that casts its shadow on the beholder is to breathe the aura of those mountains, of that branch,” 255.
46 Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” 518.
47 Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs,” 337.
48 Fürnkäs, “Aura,”141–2.
49 Stoessel, Aura, 27.
50 Benjamin, “On Some Motifs,” 338.
51 Stephen Jaeger, Enchantment, 100.
52 Spangenberg, “Aura,” 400–16.
53 Göhler, “Political Representation Reconsidered,” 23.
54 Pitkin, The Concept of Representation, 209–41.
55 An interesting discussion of existential representation in relation to Eric Voegelin’s theory of political representation can be found in Vatter, Divine Democracy, 78-82.
56 Jaeger, “Aura and Charisma,” 21.
57 Weber, On Charisma, 48.
58 Geertz, “Centers, Kings, and Charisma,”123 and 143.
59 The competing thesis of this one, is the one defended by Steven Hooper. In his cross-cultural theory of relics, Hooper disagrees with this idea with a pragmatic argument: “the notion that images are ‘mere’ symbols or only indicate divine presence, rather than embody it, seems to be at odds with religious practice in most parts of the world, including Christianised ones,” Hooper, “A Cross-cultural Theory of Relics,”192. If this kind of affirmation is not useful for a general theory of relics, at least it is very useful for interpreting the politics of relics in the West. The distinction between both kind of objects is perhaps what differentiates Western culture from other cultures driven by different religions. In aiming to obtain a general theory, Hooper excludes religious dogma and focuses on practice. What is questionable, in my view, is whether a general theory of culture is possible. This exclusion of differentiated religious meanings allows him to make connections between apparently disparate behaviour across cultures and over long periods of time and therefore to affirm that behaviour in relation to images and to body parts is equivalent across different cultures. In his general theory of relics hence, the portrait would also be a relic, in particular, it belongs to the category of Image relics/Substitute relics, or relics by equivalence, whether an icon of the Virgin or the portrait of Louis XIV. See Hooper, “A Cross-cultural Theory of Relics,” 194: “In this scheme the special personage in the particular cultural context will be attributed with significant powers and qualities, and will by definition have high status. This context may not be explicitly religious, but the behaviour patterns towards the special personage will have a religious character, involving veneration, adulation, respect and dedicated journeys leading to altered medical, psychological and emotion among devotees or fans. In recent history the range of special personages has become broader.” More in accordance with my position is David Freedberg challenges this assimilation of relics and images in his The Power of Images.
60 In fact, as Peter Brown has pointed out, in Late Antiquity onwards, the holy man had objective and inalienable power. Peter Brown, “The Rise and Function of the Holy Man.” See also Peterson, “Witness to the Truth,” 156, who claims for the martyr a charismatic status, especially associated with the eschatological moment. It is a special witness to the truth associated with the suffering and death of Christ. It embodies the idea of power as a gift in the extreme form of the sacrifice of one's own life.
61 See Cignac, “Charismes,” 139–62.
62 I owe this remark to Arthur Bradley.
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Montserrat Herrero
Montserrat Herrero is Full Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Navarra (Spain). She is the Principal Investigator of a Project on Religion and Civil Society at the Institute Culture and Society at the same University.