Preface

If Carl Schmitt coined the term "political theology" in the early twentieth century, the Middle Ages may be said to have invented it. The often contentious but always tightly linked bond between Church and State assured that theology would resonate in secular politics, society and representational practices from the fourth to the fifteenth century.

Those practices produced events and artifacts so varied and complex that the following inventory only begins to suggest their range: the concept of kingship, the crusades, the inquisition, feudalism, serfdom, geographic expansion and exploration describe only a few pragmatic examples of "political theologies." Similarly, in the world of representation, medieval culture derived forms, themes, and motivation from the same forces that determined state institutions and policies: Romanesque and Gothic edifices, polyphonic music, philosophers like Augustine, Boethius, Eriugena, Abelard, Aquinas, Buridan, Oresme; historians like Joinville, Froissart, Commynes; lyric and narrative poets, like Marcabru, Rutebeuf, Dante, Christine de Pizan, Petrarch, Chrétien de Troyes, Geoffrey of Monmouth, the Grail legend and the Matter of Britain, Jean de Meun, Parzifal, and a multitude of other literary works.

Nor should we forget the role of political theology in inspiring the first examples of vernacular prose. In Old French, it was the need to explain the deflection of the Fourth Crusade from Jerusalem to Constantinople. By the same token, Spanish prose originated from the necessity of finding an intelligible means of communicating between the diverse communities of al-Andalus: Christians, Arabs, Jews, and French immigrants. Vernacular prose was also the language used by the preaching orders to combat heresy, and rekindle religious fervor among the laity beginning in the early thirteenth century. Charles V of France encouraged intellectuals to make increasingly partisan use of the vernacular to resolve the Great Schism of the Western Church after 1378.

Medieval religious orthodoxy centered in part on the fear of contamination by the other, or, as Robert de Boron so colorfully demonstrates in the opening passages of his Merlin, of idolatry and blasphemy, either in the form of a falling away from the divine or of seeking to imitate God by constructing surrogate or counterfactual representations. This is one, albeit only one, of the intersecting vectors where medieval and post-structural inquiry may be seen to converge, particularly in thinkers like Schmitt, Adorno, Levinas, Derrida, and Agamben, for example. The post-modern dimension may be expressed in terms of "the challenge of asking to what extent traditional and modern concepts of the ban on graven images and blasphemy—including the views on religion, violence, imagery, and language they entail—can still shed light on contemporary debates."¹

Whether in a medieval or modern setting, idolatry haunts orthodoxy as a barely repressed recognition of its vulnerability. Authenticity's "other," its pale shadow, is the counterfeit image, resemblance. And where the metaphysical armature of the numinous is as tenuous as it must be in the case of true divinity, the fear of misrepresentation, of idolatry, is ever present. At the same time, it is idolatry—or the fear of false representation—that helps define what is meant by a "true" concept of the divine. For one can hardly have a sense of what is false, without a correspondingly strong belief of how a true picture should appear, at least in principle. The issues at stake here are linked to basic concepts of what we mean by medieval culture and its beliefs or, ideologies. Cultural orthodoxies—and the inevitable challenges they generate—traffic in imagery or idolatry, in naming and misnaming, in acceptable or traitorous codes of conduct. Concepts matter very much since they constitute the credo to which members of the society will pledge fidelity, or conversely, seek to defy. This is why "philosophical religion, which attempts to purify the divinity of anthropomorphism, considers the crux of the problem of idolatry to be the problem of error. Idolatry is perceived first and foremost as an improper conception of God in the mind of the worshipper, thereby internalizing the sin."²

A dialogue between contemporary critiques of religious thought and medieval discourse may demonstrate not simply the insights that the latter can contribute to our understanding of the "religious...