Mysteries of State as a concept of Absolutism has its mediaeval background. It is a late offshoot of that spiritual-secular hybridism which, as a result of the infinite cross-relations between Church and State, may be found in every century of the Middle Ages and has deservedly attracted the attention of historians for many years. After A. Alföldi's fundamental studies on ceremonial and insignia of Roman emperors, Theodor Klauser discussed more recently the origin of the episcopal insignia and rights of honor, and showed very clearly how, in and after the age of Constantine the Great, various privileges of vestment and rank of the highest officers of the Late Empire were passed on to the bishops of the victorious Church. At about the same time, Percy Ernst Schramm published his compendious article on the mutual exchange of rights of honor between sacerdotium and regnum, in which he demonstrated how the imitatio imperii on the part of the spiritual power was balanced by an imitatio sacerdotii on the part of the secular power. Schramm carried his study only to the threshold of the Hohenstaufen period, and he was right to stop where he did. For the mutual borrowings of which he speaks—insignia, titles, symbols, privileges, and prerogatives—affected in the earlier Middle Ages chiefly the ruling individuals, both spiritual and secular, the crown-wearing pontiff and the mitre-wearing emperor, until finally the sacerdotium had an imperial appearance, and the regnum a clerical touch.
M edieval historian Ernst Kantorowicz's masterpiece describes how medieval and Renaissance thinkers devised a complex and, at times, mystical continuity between kingship and the person who happened to hold the office. This continuity was theorized as the "king's two bodies." The king's natural body has physical attributes, suffers, and dies, naturally, as do all humans; but the king's other body, the spiritual body, transcends the earthly and serves as a symbol of his office as majesty with the divine right to rule. The notion of the two bodies allowed for the continuity of monarchy even when the monarch died, as summed up in the formulation "The king is dead. Long live the king." Bringing together liturgical works, images, and polemical material, The King's Two Bodies explores the long Christian past behind this "political theology." It provides a subtle history of how commonwealths developed symbolic means for establishing their sovereignty and, with such means, began to establish early forms of the nation-state. Kantorowicz fled Nazi Germany in , after refusing to sign a Nazi loyalty oath, and settled in the United States. While teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, he once again refused to sign an oath of allegiance, this one designed to identify Communist Party sympathizers. He resigned as a result of the controversy and moved to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he remained for the rest of his life, and where he wrote The King's Two Bodies.
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