The two faces of power 3: the kingdom and the government
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, March 15, 2023
“Le roi règne, mais il ne gouverne pas”, “the king reigns, but he does not govern”. That this formula, which is at the centre of the debate between Peterson and Schmitt on political theology and that, in its Latin formulation (rex regnat, sed non gubernat), dates back to the seventeenth-century polemics against the King of Poland, Sigismund III, contains something like the paradigm of the double structure of Western politics, is what we tried to demonstrate in a book published almost fifteen years ago. Once again, at its base there is a genuinely theological problem, that of the divine government of the world, it itself, ultimately, expression of an ontological problem. In Chapter X of Book L of the Metaphysics, Aristotle asked himself whether the universe possesses the good as something separate (echorismenon) or as an internal order (taxin). That is, it was about resolving the drastic opposition between transcendence and immanence, articulating them together through the idea of an order of worldly entities. The cosmological problem also had a political significance, if Aristotle can immediately compare the relationship between the transcendent good and the world to that which binds the strategist of an army to the ordering of the soldiers who compose it, and a house to the mutual connection of the creatures that live in it. “Beings”, he adds, “do not want to be badly governed (politeuesthai kakos) and therefore, there ought to be only one sovereign (heis koiranon)”, which manifests itself in them in the form of the order that connects them. This means that, ultimately, the immobile engine of Book L and the nature of the cosmos form a one system with two faces and that power — be it divine or human — must keep the two poles united and be both a transcendent norm and an immanent order, both kingdom and government.
It will be task of medieval Scholasticism and, in particular, of Thomas to translate this ontological paradigm into the theological problem of the divine government of the world. Essential, to this end, is the idea of order. It expresses, on the one hand, the relation between God and his creatures (ordo ad Deum) and, on the other, the relation of creatures with themselves (ordo ad invicem). The two orders are strictly linked, and yet, their relationship is not as perfectly symmetrical as it may seem. That the problem has, also this time, a political aspect, it is evident in the comparison that Thomas makes of the law with its execution. “As in a family”, he writes, “order is imposed by the law and precepts by the head of the family, who is the principle of each of the beings which are ordered in the household, with a view to carrying out the activities which pertain to the order of the household, in the same way the nature of physical things is the principle by which each of them carries out the activity proper to it in the order of the universe”. How, however, can the law, as the command of only one, be translated in many carrying out the order of one? If order — as the definitely non-random example of the strategist and head of the family seems to imply — depends on the command of a head, how can its execution be inscribed in the nature of beings so different from each other?
The aporia that will increasingly mark both the order of the cosmos and that of the city begins to become visible here. Beings stand in a specific relationship among themselves, but this is only the expression of their relation to the only divine principle and, vice versa, beings are ordered insofar as they stand in a certain relationship with God, but this relationship consists only in their mutual relationship. The immanent order is only the relation to the transcendent principle, but this has no other content than the immanent order. The two orders refer to each other and are mutually founded. The perfect edifice of medieval cosmology rests on this circle and has no consistency outside it. Hence the complex, subtle dialectic between primary and secondary causes, absolute power and ordered power, through which Scholasticism will try, without ever fully succeeding, to sort this aporia out.
If we now return to the problem of the political order from where we started and which explicitly refers to this theological paradigm, it will not surprise to find the same circularities and the same aporias in it. State and administration, kingdom and government, norm and decision are mutually connected and are founded and exist through each other; and, however — indeed precisely for this reason — their symmetry cannot be perfect or unequivocally guaranteed. The king and his ministers, “politics” and “police”, law and its execution can come into conflict and nothing ensures that this conflict can be settled once and for all. The bipolar machine of Western politics is always in the process of corrupting and shattering itself, perpetually at the mercy of changes and revolutions that question its functioning and bipolarity to the very extent to which they seem to reaffirm them each time.
The primacy of the government over the kingdom and of the administration over the constitution which we are living in today is, in reality, not unprecedented in the history of the West. It reached its first and radical formulation in the elaboration of the doctrine of the rex usilis by the canonists of the thirteenth century. It is on the basis of these elaborations that, in 1245, Pope Innocent IV, at the request of the Portuguese clergy and nobility, issued the bull Grandi non immerito, with which he deposed King Sancho II from the government of the kingdom, which he had proved unable to administer, assigning to his brother Alfonso of Boulogne the cura et administratio generalis and however leaving Sancho with his royal dignitas. The dual structure of the governmental machine contains the possibility that the bipolarity in which it articulates can be questioned if it ceases to be functional to the system. It is significant, however, since neither of the two sides of power has its foundation in itself, that even in this extreme case the royal dignity has not been taken away. The duality of legitimacy and legality is only one aspect of this bipolarity: the kingdom legitimises the government and, however, legitimacy has no other meaning than the legality of the government’s actions and measures.
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, March 15, 2023
“Le roi règne, mais il ne gouverne pas”, “the king reigns, but he does not govern”. That this formula, which is at the centre of the debate between Peterson and Schmitt on political theology and that, in its Latin formulation (rex regnat, sed non gubernat), dates back to the seventeenth-century polemics against the King of Poland, Sigismund III, contains something like the paradigm of the double structure of Western politics, is what we tried to demonstrate in a book published almost fifteen years ago. Once again, at its base there is a genuinely theological problem, that of the divine government of the world, it itself, ultimately, expression of an ontological problem. In Chapter X of Book L of the Metaphysics, Aristotle asked himself whether the universe possesses the good as something separate (echorismenon) or as an internal order (taxin). That is, it was about resolving the drastic opposition between transcendence and immanence, articulating them together through the idea of an order of worldly entities. The cosmological problem also had a political significance, if Aristotle can immediately compare the relationship between the transcendent good and the world to that which binds the strategist of an army to the ordering of the soldiers who compose it, and a house to the mutual connection of the creatures that live in it. “Beings”, he adds, “do not want to be badly governed (politeuesthai kakos) and therefore, there ought to be only one sovereign (heis koiranon)”, which manifests itself in them in the form of the order that connects them. This means that, ultimately, the immobile engine of Book L and the nature of the cosmos form a one system with two faces and that power — be it divine or human — must keep the two poles united and be both a transcendent norm and an immanent order, both kingdom and government.
It will be task of medieval Scholasticism and, in particular, of Thomas to translate this ontological paradigm into the theological problem of the divine government of the world. Essential, to this end, is the idea of order. It expresses, on the one hand, the relation between God and his creatures (ordo ad Deum) and, on the other, the relation of creatures with themselves (ordo ad invicem). The two orders are strictly linked, and yet, their relationship is not as perfectly symmetrical as it may seem. That the problem has, also this time, a political aspect, it is evident in the comparison that Thomas makes of the law with its execution. “As in a family”, he writes, “order is imposed by the law and precepts by the head of the family, who is the principle of each of the beings which are ordered in the household, with a view to carrying out the activities which pertain to the order of the household, in the same way the nature of physical things is the principle by which each of them carries out the activity proper to it in the order of the universe”. How, however, can the law, as the command of only one, be translated in many carrying out the order of one? If order — as the definitely non-random example of the strategist and head of the family seems to imply — depends on the command of a head, how can its execution be inscribed in the nature of beings so different from each other?
The aporia that will increasingly mark both the order of the cosmos and that of the city begins to become visible here. Beings stand in a specific relationship among themselves, but this is only the expression of their relation to the only divine principle and, vice versa, beings are ordered insofar as they stand in a certain relationship with God, but this relationship consists only in their mutual relationship. The immanent order is only the relation to the transcendent principle, but this has no other content than the immanent order. The two orders refer to each other and are mutually founded. The perfect edifice of medieval cosmology rests on this circle and has no consistency outside it. Hence the complex, subtle dialectic between primary and secondary causes, absolute power and ordered power, through which Scholasticism will try, without ever fully succeeding, to sort this aporia out.
If we now return to the problem of the political order from where we started and which explicitly refers to this theological paradigm, it will not surprise to find the same circularities and the same aporias in it. State and administration, kingdom and government, norm and decision are mutually connected and are founded and exist through each other; and, however — indeed precisely for this reason — their symmetry cannot be perfect or unequivocally guaranteed. The king and his ministers, “politics” and “police”, law and its execution can come into conflict and nothing ensures that this conflict can be settled once and for all. The bipolar machine of Western politics is always in the process of corrupting and shattering itself, perpetually at the mercy of changes and revolutions that question its functioning and bipolarity to the very extent to which they seem to reaffirm them each time.
The primacy of the government over the kingdom and of the administration over the constitution which we are living in today is, in reality, not unprecedented in the history of the West. It reached its first and radical formulation in the elaboration of the doctrine of the rex usilis by the canonists of the thirteenth century. It is on the basis of these elaborations that, in 1245, Pope Innocent IV, at the request of the Portuguese clergy and nobility, issued the bull Grandi non immerito, with which he deposed King Sancho II from the government of the kingdom, which he had proved unable to administer, assigning to his brother Alfonso of Boulogne the cura et administratio generalis and however leaving Sancho with his royal dignitas. The dual structure of the governmental machine contains the possibility that the bipolarity in which it articulates can be questioned if it ceases to be functional to the system. It is significant, however, since neither of the two sides of power has its foundation in itself, that even in this extreme case the royal dignity has not been taken away. The duality of legitimacy and legality is only one aspect of this bipolarity: the kingdom legitimises the government and, however, legitimacy has no other meaning than the legality of the government’s actions and measures.
(English translation by I, Robot)
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René Magritte, The double secret, 1927. Courtesy of WikiArt.
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