A Sovereign Act of Negation: Schmitt’s Political Theology and its Ideal Medievalism

Clare Monagle

Abstract   This article argues that Carl Schmitt’s political theology is premised on an idealised and totalising vision of the Middle Ages. That is, he casts modern political concepts as debased and corrupt in comparison to the proper politics of the Medieval Church, as he sees it. Drawing on a historically contextualised reading of the Fourth Lateran Council, which took place in 1215, the article’s author argues that Schmitt’s medieval comparison is much more complicated than he suggests. Schmitt’s historical vision is, thus, a wilful projection of unity onto a diverse and distant past.

Carl Schmitt’s model of political theology is premised upon an idealised Roman Catholic Middle Ages in which there is no separation between the political and the sacred. His indictment of the delusions and corruptions of political concepts in modernity is premised on his perfected point of origin, that of unum sanctum, one holy catholic apostolic church. This paper seeks to question Schmitt’s medieval foundation in two ways. First, I will extricate Schmitt’s Middle Ages through a reading of his notion of the Modern. Second, I will contrast his vision of medieval politics with an example of a statement of sovereignty that is actually medieval. This example of the Constitutions of the Lateran Council of 1215 will demonstrate that the medievalised political vision of Schmitt is a totalising projection, rather than a demonstrably reliable vision of the past.¹

The Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 looks, on the one hand, like Schmitt’s medieval moment par excellence. Its pronouncements constitute one of the most decisive statements of papal sovereignty of the Middle Ages. It is concerned with precisely the properly political agenda that Schmitt sees as foundational in medieval Europe, that of the clear articulation of amities and enmities authorised by the proximity of the papacy to the sacred. This Council defines the boundaries of Christendom, via the demarcation of its borders both in a theological and spatial sense. The papacy defines Christendom as a sovereign political unit in its clear opposition to its enemies: heretics within and infidels outside.

On the other hand, the recourse to the sacred as an authorising and boundary-setting force is far more contingent and qualified than Schmitt would suggest. The Constitutions of Lateran IV actually articulate a paradoxically anti-theological epistemology. That is, in order to justify its assertion of sovereignty, the papacy produces a model of human access to truth and divinity that is fragmented and timorous. Rather than the Schmittian vision of bold political formulations produced in the authority of unum sanctum, we see a displacement of the political from the sacred into the always marginal operations of human language. The Council performs this shift through its endorsement of the systematic theology of Peter Lombard, who stands in more broadly in this context for the proto-scholastic curriculum of the schools of Paris. At the time when the Papacy is making one of its strongest statements of centralised, sovereign authority, it is also enshrining an approach to doctrine which is dialectical, rational and notional in its orientation. This medieval moment of sovereignty is brokered analytically via a move away from a notion of language as infused with divinity, towards a notion of language as always compromised in its capacity to represent Divine Truth. The complicated political theology of Lateran IV suggests that the politically sublime Catholic formulation of Schmitt, which he casts in such glowing relation to the Modern, is a problematic simplification.

According to Schmitt, famously, the sovereign is the one ‘who decides on the exception’ (Schmitt 1985: 5). And, ‘The state of exception in jurisprudence is analogous to the miracle in theology’ (Schmitt 1985: 36). This analogy supposes the correspondence between the exception and the miracle and between jurisprudence and theology. One implication of this distinction is an assertion of the gulf between the medieval and the modern. The medieval is Catholic and its hypostatic moment, when immanence and transcendence are co-joined, is the miracle. The modern, however, is governed by jurisprudence, the ostensibly rational body of law that constitutes the legal life of the state. According to Schmitt’s logic, the real moment of actualisation of the claims to authority of that jurisprudence is the state of exception when the sovereign suspends those laws on the authority vested in him from somewhere else, often indeterminate. The reason for this indeterminacy is, according to Schmitt, that ‘all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularised theological concepts’ (Schmitt 1985: 36). The modern, therefore, denies its medieval self. Modern theories of the state cloak their claims to Presence in rationalist discourse.

The effect of this formulation is to posit the necessity of a trace of Presence in modern theories of the state, which can be deployed by the sovereign as the site of his authority to render the exception. That is, the sovereign needs recourse to a transcendental claim in order to justify the status of exception. The corollary is – in terms of the analogy between the exception and the miracle – that medieval theories of the state were likewise informed by a confidence in Presence, communicated by the miracle. The difference is, however, that this notion of Presence was the explicit foundation of statements of sovereignty, rather than something veiled and surreptitious. This is because where the modern state has jurisprudence, the medieval has theology at its core. The positive statement of God’s existence, that is the basis of theology, is the point of origin for confidence in the Holy Roman Catholic church and her institutions.

Is Schmitt right in this reading of the medieval? And, does it matter if he is not? What is the implication, logically, if the analogy between the exception and miracle, between jurisprudence and theology, does not hold up? The consequence would be the refusal of Schmitt’s implicitly historical formulation. His point was that modern theories of the state mask a vestigially medieval orientation towards the hypostasis of the exception. Schmitt’s historical explanation for this trace was that the past four hundred years of European history need to be understood as a reaction to the theological and political turmoil of the sixteenth century, whereby the unity of Christendom had been repressed and reformed into petty nation-states.² The violent conflict of the reformation and counter-reformation necessitated the development of a theologically neutralised political language, one that would enable agreement and compromise in an increasingly fractured Europe. But this move could not evacuate theological concepts, they were merely deferred into secularised and ‘depoliticised’ linguistic formulations over the course of the following four hundred years. By ‘depoliticised’ Schmitt meant that political language moved away, after the Reformation, from clearly articulating the friend/enemy distinction that he held to be crucial to the operation of the political. He wrote that ‘all political concepts, images and terms have a polemical meaning. They are focused on a specific conflict and are bound to a concrete-situation; the result (which manifests itself in war or revolution) is a friend-enemy grouping’ (Schmitt 1976: 30). The logical inference of Schmitt’s historical line is that, in the pre-modern period when Europe was united as Christendom, the certainty manifest by a theologically authorised polity meant that the friend/enemy distinction could be made without ambivalence or qualification. The combination of Schmitt’s analogue between miracle and exception and his idea of a post-reformation ‘depoliticization’, posits a medieval foundation for the political as he understands it. The political, under this rubric, constitutes the possibility of definitive statements as to the nature of the friend/enemy distinction that produces polities and the language that makes them.

In Roman Catholicism and Political Form, Schmitt’s identification with pre-modern Catholic Europe as an ideal political unit is explicit (Schmitt 1996). He espouses, according to John McCormick, a ‘clerico-conservative vision of Europe’ which would reject the sacralisation of privacy that he holds to characterise economic and social liberalism (McCormick 1998). The embrace of privacy takes enmity and friendship out of the public sphere and so divests public life of its political momentum. We see again here Schmitt’s notion of the historical movement towards the neutralisation of politics within modernity. Modernity’s focus on privacy and interiority renders decisions about enmity as personal and subjective, rather than procedural and objective. Schmitt argues that a properly Catholic Europe, on the other hand, would refuse this evasion wrought by privacy and insist upon a substantively political orientation. This orientation would be necessary as the interests of the individual would be merged with that of the Church. The goal of spiritual salvation would be entirely interwoven with the success of the political institution of the Church. Within this structure, there is no need for privacy as the highest expression of interiority would be in the service of the transcendental ideal of Ecclesia. For Schmitt, in Roman Catholicism and Political Form, the Catholic Church is the historical institution that has most successfully manifested its politics without a disingenuous denial of its profoundly political orientation. The Catholic Church, as a hypothetical polity, would see no contradiction between the divisive articulation of its friends and enemies and the drive towards ontological purity.

It does matter then, whether or not Schmitt is right in his articulation of the Catholic Middle Ages. His two seminal distinctions about the exception and about the friend/enemy, both depend upon an ideal of pre-modernity that actualises a genuine politics that the modern cannot access due to the accretion of depoliticised and neutralised language. Without the medieval foundation, he would not have the theology that haunts modernity. His lament for what has been lost is dependent upon his conservative historical vision of the Middle Ages, which is constituted by a clerical hegemony informed by faith.

Schmitt’s critique of liberalism has had tremendous influence across the political spectrum. This is well-known and need not be rehearsed in detail here.³ In particular, Schmitt has been deployed by theorists keen to interrogate and problematise the notions of neutrality and universalism inhering within the political languages of liberalism. As Chantal Mouffe points out, the ideas of Carl Schmitt ‘allow us to acknowledge – and, therefore, be in a better position to try to negotiate – an important paradox inscribed in the very nature of liberal democracy’ (Mouffe 2000: 37). Schmitt’s critique of liberalism, grounded in the historical genealogy I have set up above, has challenged a number of its fundamental tenets. This has forced, particularly in the work of Mouffe and Giorgio Agamben, a serious and productive engagement with the ideas of Carl Schmitt. While remaining highly critical of Schmitt’s most absolutising claims, scholars have engaged his provocative distinctions as a means to better understand contemporary political communities, desires and apparatus. Mouffe again, ‘Schmitt is an adversary from whom we can learn, because we can draw on his insights. Turning them against him, we should use them to formulate a better understanding of liberal democracy, one that acknowledges its paradoxical nature’ (Mouffe 2000: 57).

Schmitt’s insights as to the nature of medieval political life, as the site of a foundational genuine politics grounded in an absolute distinction between friend and enemy, is one that can be ‘turned against him’. This is why I want in this article to challenge his vision of the past by recourse to a more nuanced historical analysis. If we can assess Schmitt’s vision of the past against a more involved historical panorama, it will enable a small insight into the limits of his thought, a vista upon the fantasies and its projections that inform his vision of political life. Schmitt’s articulation of the Catholic Middle Ages, when challenged, is a way into further understanding both the power and the limitations of his prophetically-tinged political visions.

What then of the medieval? What did a medieval political elaboration look like? Hence, we turn now to the aforementioned example of Lateran IV in 1215. Does this example yield a properly politicised and non-neutral set of terms? Can the medieval be made to do the work that Schmitt would have it do as foil to the modern?

It cannot. Lateran IV proffers its own strategy of neutralisation, in that it attempts to carve out a sphere of appropriate and ratified political language that is deemed to function without the apprehension of direct Divine Presence. Yes, at this Council the Church does rely on the petrine dispensation as a source for its own authority. It does claim Divine Origin. But it does not claim that this dispensation unfolds progressively in the work of history. It is not an accessible agent of truth. Instead, in the constitutions of that Council it was stated that ‘between the Creator and a creature there can be remarked no similarity so great that a greater dissimilarity cannot be seen between them’.⁴ First and foremost, the Council was determined to point out the fundamental inadequacy of human knowledge of the divine. But, at this same Council, a crusade was preached, the doctrine of transubstantiation was officially put on the books, all heretics were condemned, and Peter Lombard’s theology was endorsed. This was a watershed Council for the medieval church, and its documents constituted one of the strongest statements of papal primacy of the pre-modern era.⁵ Sandwiched within these expressions of papal theory and intent, however, was the statement of negative theology written above. As it went about defining and consolidating definitions of Christendom, this same Council declared that the principle of dissimilarity should always underlie any rendering of God’s being by man. That principle is that what can be construed as human positive knowledge can – at best – work to indicate what God is not. The overall function of the Council – as discernable from its constitutions – was the construction of a fortified, united Christendom. Among the positive assertions of sovereign power, however, was this reminder of the fragility of human knowledge and man’s ultimate distance from his Maker.

Institution building and negative theology might seem to be incongruous partners. As Derrida has it, ‘negative theology consists of considering that every predicative language is inadequate to the essence, in truth to the hyperessentiality (the being beyond Being) of God; consequently only a negative (“apophatic”) attribution can claim to approach God, and to prepare us for a silent intuition of God’ (Derrida 1989: 4). In the terms of medieval Christianity, negative theology constitutes the refusal of the possibility that the ontic logos might bear Presence into the terms of human language.⁶ Instead, God must be apprehended on the via negativa. He is to be found inter-stitially in the assertions that language makes about things, concepts. He is found there, because he is none of those things and can be recognised by his absence. To paraphrase Derrida, God is written completely otherwise, He cannot be in these terms (Derrida 1989: 4). Therefore it is only known what he is not. The statement of Lateran IV that ‘between the Creator and a creature there can be remarked no similarity so great that a greater dissimilarity cannot be seen between them’ (Alberigo 1972: 232) reflects that same refusal of predicability as described by Derrida, the appearance of similarity between man and God can only be understood as a semiotic bridge to greater knowledge of the distance between them.

How then does the statement of negative theology at Lateran IV, and its limitation of the possibility of the predication of positive attributes of God, cohere with the assertion of papal primacy and direction of papal action of that Council? For negative theology appears to be anti-foundational, in that it derogates the productive capacities of language to produce a positive system of representation which might legitimate action. But the overall mood evinced from the records of the Council was not simply one of timidity in the light of God’s inscrutability. Rather, the Council proceeded – on the whole – with a degree of confidence. Drawing on the warrant of ‘the keys of the church, which Jesus Christ Himself granted to the apostles and their successors’,⁷ the Constitutions of Lateran IV proudly asserted the mandate granted to the papacy by the petrine dispensation of Matthew 16:18, ‘you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my Church’. In its confident assertion of apostolic succession, Innocent III’s papacy declared itself authorised to continue that dispensation. Ecclesia lived and breathed, in the ongoing nature of revelation. Its task was continual vigilance to keep the world safe for sacraments, so that the duty of mediating salvation could be performed. Consequently, ‘between the Creator and a creature there can be remarked no similarity so great that a greater dissimilarity cannot be seen between them’. The gap between God and Man was profound, with the exception of the infusion of grace achieved sacramentally, through the intervention of a priest. The important word of this formulation is ‘remarked’ [notari]. It is not possible to denote, to describe, or to inscribe the similarity between God and Man. But, as the constitutions of the Council remind, ecclesia can solve that separation through the mini-hypostases of the sacraments.

The sacraments, then, are the only conduit to a direct experience of God. Any other apprehension of Presence must proceed with the knowledge of the chasm of dissimilarity that precludes an immediate relationship. Lateran IV thus declares the monopoly of the papacy over direct access to the Divine. If the direct experience of Grace can only be achieved through the mystical nature of the sacraments, then it is clearly owned by Ecclesia. To think about God notionally or metaphorically, then, is inherently limited and contingent. Jean-Luc Marion writes that negative theology is used ‘to place God at a great distance from the concept of metaphysics’ (Marion 2002: 129). This is precisely the point of the formulation of Lateran IV: the irreducibility between God and man frees human language from the compulsion to imagine the hyper-essentiality of God. Writing, inscription or remarking are better, therefore, put to the use of edification and discipline in the creaturely world, as the constitutions of Lateran IV imply. Marion says that this use of negative theology constitutes a ‘pragmatic theology of absence’ (Marion 2002: 155). It is pragmatic because it eschews the possibility that mystical revelation might be the basis for a positive, linguistic knowledge of the essence of the Divine. Instead, it suggests that the dissimilarity between God and man might be a foundation for a linguistic theology that embraces the contingencies of language as productive. In this case, the strategic deployment of negative theology in the constitutions of Lateran IV makes the case that even the predication of being upon God is to presume an impossible and essential knowledge of Him. Language, of course, can and will be used to predicate things of God. The important point being, as the constitutions of Lateran IV reminded, that this predication be affirmed as contingent, arbitrary and notional. This frees human language from the failure of not registering God properly. Instead, it is a notion that affirms the semiotic possibilities of language within the relativised world of multiplicity. This is the sovereign act of negation of the Papacy, it is to confirm that since human statements of the nature of God’s being must bear the assumption of fundamental dissimilarity to God himself, one can therefore presume language to build knowledge in the world without imperilling sacred truth.

This distinction made between mystical and cognitive knowledge of God in the constitutions of Lateran IV has a complicated context in the politics of pedagogy in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. This statement of negative theology occurred in the course of a defence of the Christology of Peter Lombard, who had been one of the premier theologians of the twelfth century. Lombard had been accused of Christological Nihilism in his Sententiae,⁸ of minimising Christ’s humanity in his explanation of the hypostasis. That is, in his efforts to explain just how Christ could constitute God and Man in the same instance, he had been charged with a heterodox linguistic formulation of the relationship between them. Of course, debates about the efficacy of the new linguistic theology emerging in the schools – as opposed to the mystically oriented theology of the monasteries – were nothing new. Before Peter Lombard, Berengar of Tours, Abelard and Gilbert of Poitiers, had each felt the wrath of those who considered their investigation into the nature of sacred words to be contradictory to the simplicity of belief demanded of the faithful.⁹ Simply, each of these theologians had applied the practice of dialectic to sacred doctrines, such as the Eucharist or the Trinity. And consequently, each had felt the ire of more mystically-oriented critics who preferred to approach theological concerns through the rubric of prayer and meditation, rather than through the application of dialectical reasoning. As a result of these conflicts, all three of Berengar, Abelard and Gilbert of Poitiers had been subject to papal censure.

The Sententiae of Peter Lombard, in particular, attracted the ire of critics. The reason for this ire was that the Sententiae was not just a work of exposition but, unlike his predecessors, proposed new a new theological synthesis. Also, unlike the earlier examples, however, Peter Lombard was not only exonerated by the Papacy, but was actually endorsed. At Lateran IV, as we shall see, the Papacy confessed cum petro, with Peter. Prior to Lombard, Abelard had isolated points of doctrinal contradiction in his Sic et Non and suggested that dialectic might be an appropriate means of solving these contradictions. Peter Lombard went one step further and tried to broker the solutions. In his work he attempted to create theologically novel responses that resolved differences in the Christian tradition. Given this totalising dialectical ambition, the Sententiae was something of a lightning rod for criticism. In particular, its Christology came under question. As part of Peter Lombard’s synthetic project, he needed to inquire as to the constitution of Christ’s personhood in order to reconcile contradictory accounts of his identity. The Council of Chalcedon had declared, in 451, that Christ was one person in two natures. He was the second person of the Trinity, composed of mutually imbricated human and divine natures. According to this formulation, Christ’s personhood was constituted only in the particular combination of human and divine natures that characterised His Incarnation. This idea of personhood, of course, was very different from the usual definition of the term as it was applicable only to Christ. Boethius, in a formulation which was standard throughout the schools of Paris, had defined a person as an individual substance of a rational nature. According to Boethius, the key characteristics, then, of personhood were individuality and rationality. If the Boethian definition was followed, this would mean that what made a human a person was not the same as that which made Christ a person. Christ’s personhood was constituted in his two natures, man’s personhood was found in his rational nature. Doctrinally, Christ needed to be fully human to bring about the salvation of humanity, to make satisfactory reparation for the sins of Adam. Yet, how could He be fully human if His personhood was defined differently from that of humans? This was precisely the sort of contradiction that Lombard wanted to resolve in the Sententiae. Both the formulation of Chalcedon and the doctrinal writings of Boethius were considered to be orthodox and authoritative in the Christian tradition. How might they be made consistent with each other? Following this problem, Peter Lombard asked whether ‘Christ, insofar as He is a human being, [was] a person or something else [aliquid]?’.¹⁰ This question, and Lombard’s answer to it, was the source of charges of Christo-logical Nihilism made against him in the second half of the twelfth century. For, in his answer, Lombard was forced into equations of Christ’s being that attempted to define how his being might be broken down and understood in binary terms. The point of the Christological mystery was the irreducibility of the hypostasis. Hence, a theologian would invariably fall into error when he tried to reduce Christ to the sum of His parts. It was charged, then, that Lombard said that Christ’s human person was not something, or, in fact, nothing at all. He tried to argue that Christ could have a human nature, without having human person. He attempted to follow Chalcedon to the letter, with the result that he refused the idea of Christ’s human person, he said that it was an aliquid/something else. Consequently, Peter Lombard and his followers were called Nichilianistae by their critics – in the first usage of this word. So controversial was he considered to be that he warranted the creation of a neologism, the word that we now know as ‘nihilist’.

Once the issue had been raised, it necessitated analysis and resolution because the issue of Christ’s nature was the fundamental issue of Christianity itself. Christ’s Incarnation and Resurrection was that which enabled the supercession of Jewish Law and that which facilitated human salvation through the intervention of grace. Part of this intervention of grace was the Word that infused all words. After the rupture of the garden, where knowledge was lost, Christ’s participation on earth had revitalised signification. Words were no longer vessels for the Law, but living sites of revelation for Christian believers. And the Church held the monopoly on the provision of this Grace. Christ had given Peter the task of founding a church; this authority was passed on from pope to pope, but always with the original petrine dispensation in mind. Christ’s constitution of human and divine concomitantly was, obviously, the cornerstone of Christian identity. To be called Christological Nihilist/Nichilianistae was not just to be accused of ordinary error. It was to be charged with denying the basis of the linguistic, epistemological, mystical, sacramental and ecclesiastical life of Christendom.

The other serious charge levelled against Peter Lombard, and one that is heard at Lateran IV, was that in his effort to describe the unity of the Trinity he actually created a heretical quaternity. These allegations were made by the apocalyptic monk Joachim of Fiore, who had insisted that the unity of the Trinity be understood as ‘a collective and analogous unity in the way many men are called one people and many believers one church’.¹¹ Joachim’s emphasis was on the mystical union of the Trinity.¹² He believed that any attempt to isolate the element that united the three members of the Trinity in a concrete linguistic form would be tantamount to heresy. Joachim argued that Peter Lombard insisted on the imposition of a conceptual summa quaedam res (‘a certain highest thing’) upon the miraculous diversity of God. That is, Peter Lombard had used this term to designate the quality or thing which links the divine members of the Trinity to each other. Joachim, however, wanted to approach the unity and distinctions between divine things in an always deferred and metaphorical way. To define, in a positive sense, just what that unity consisted of would be too bald and too presumptuous. Rather, the believer should approach divine unity through the comparative structure of analogue. Joachim, throughout his writings, used the visible world as a meditative map for the invisible. He registered chains of spiritual similarity that aimed at a mystical appreciation of God’s being. The Council was firm in its condemnation of Joachim’s doctrine of ‘collective or analogous’ Trinitarian unity. The second constitution declared that ‘we, with the approbation of the holy and universal Council, believe and confess with Peter [Lombard] that there is one single supreme reality, incomprehensible indeed and ineffable, who truly is Father, Son and Holy Ghost, the three persons together and each of them separately, and therefore in God there is a Trinity only, not a quaternity’.¹³ Peter Lombard’s summa quaedam res was endorsed as the appropriate name for ‘the principle of all things, apart from which another cannot be found’.¹⁴ Evidently, Joachim’s perceived criticism that the summa quaedam res suggested a fourth member of the Trinity held no sway with the Council.

Against Joachim’s analogical orientation, the Council pointedly supported Peter Lombard’s verbal formulation. In so doing, by drawing stark lines, they clearly legitimised Peter Lombard’s technical and conceptual project. It was clearly better, the constitutions inferred, to think about God in terms of discrete categories produced in language, than to assume the confluence of God and Man through the process of imagination and prayer. The second constitution asserted that ‘between the Creator and a creature there can be remarked no similarity so great that a greater dissimilarity cannot be seen between them’.¹⁵ Joachim had overstated the similarity between man and God in his conviction that analogy could function as a meditative bridge to the divine. The Council asserted that it was better to err on the side of the principle of dissimilarity, to keep statements about God firmly in the realm of what could be said in absolute faith and in absolute certainty.

The genealogy of the language of Lateran IV is complicated, as my elaboration has shown. The detail is important, however, as it shows that an assuredness of Roman Catholicism as the glue of Christendom did not necessarily produce a politicised discourse of amities and enmities. Instead, the desire of the Council to state the boundaries of orthodoxy was embedded in a concomitant avowal of the limitations of human knowledge of Truth. Yes, the papacy was assured of its original apostolic mandate. As we have seen, the Council confessed cum petro, with Peter. But this confession, at this point, is a double edged sword. In confessing thus, the papacy made a playful pun on the names of Peter Lombard and St Peter, on whose rock the church was built.¹⁶ For it was the summa quaedam res that was confessed cum petro. Peter Lombard’s summa quaedam res was the name for the principle that the members of the Trinity were somehow linked. It was a notional designation, not an absolute one. Confessing cum petro as to the utility and orthodoxy of this demarcation, the Council was to jokily declare this notionality a new rock, and Peter Lombard a new founder. On the back of accusations that the sprachlogik of the schools implied an anti-foundational christological nihilism, the words of the papacy declared the opposite. The second constitution of Lateran IV argued that it was precisely when language could be understood as radically estranged from God, as governed by a principle of dissimilarity, that it could be foundational for a positive human epistemology of concepts and distinctions.

The papacy, as an institution, outlined its own sovereign claims via its defence of Peter Lombard. And its ‘exception’, in Schmittian terms, was not the miracle. It was the petrine dispensation which is continual throughout history in the operations of the sacraments mediated by the clergy. The assuredness of that dispensation enabled Innocent III’s papacy to demarcate the exclusive management of presence in the world as the provision of the papacy, and to likewise carve out a separate sphere of productive human notional knowledge. The analogue between exception and miracle depends on a shared suspension of normal laws, of the insertion of the extrinsic and otherwise authorised power. The petrine dispensation and its sacramental function is the normal law, on the other hand, and requires no suspension. The ‘exception’, in this instance, is entirely unexceptional. Rather, the petrine dispensation is expressly foundational and literally legitimising. According to the logic of Lateran IV, then, it is the exception that decides the sovereign.

It seems to me, then, that Lateran IV does proffer a theologically neutralised political language. It does this by disavowing positive affirmations of God’s being, and insisting on the fundamental contingency of language. Schmitt’s charge had been that the evacuation of theology from political formulations was a consequence of the enforced religious relativism of the Reformation, and the need to find a political language by which this might be accommodated. As the example of Lateran IV shows, however, Schmitt’s historical schema is reductive and excessively foundational. Schmitt posits a pre-lapsarian ideal politics of the medieval, which is ruptured by the fall of the reformation. But it seems that the Council of 1215 – in spite of its universalising desires – registered the impossibility of articulating a completely sacralised political sphere. In fact, it argued for the opposite.

The problem of articulating a clear political agenda at Lateran IV resides in an explicit acknowledgement of the limitations of human language as a conduit for the expression of truth. For medieval thinkers like Peter Lombard, language always inclines towards the divine and yet stays firmly limited in its creaturely context. The same tension, I think, can be seen in Schmitt’s reading of political theology. It reveals a desire to formalise historically particular distinctions, such as those between friends and enemies, into an absolute theory of politics. It is an abstraction, perversely, that claims to be ground in the earth. Derrida writes of Schmitt’s capacity ‘to count on the pure impurity, on the impure purity of the political as such, of the properly political’ (Derrida 1997: 116). Schmitt’s particular contribution, as Derrida points out in the Politics of Friendship, is the exposition of a political concept that registers both the ideality of politics – its inclination towards perfection – as well as its foundation in concrete enmity. But this articulation of the concrete as foundational runs the risk of becoming itself an illusory chimera. As Derrida points out ‘But no politics has ever been adequate to its concept. No political event can be correctly described or defined with recourse to these concepts. And this inadequation is not accidental, since politics is essentially a praxis’ (Derrida 1997: 114).

In light of my own and Derrida’s reading of Schmitt, Lateran IV registers as a historically situated negotiation of the aporia of politics and thinking politically. The radical statement of dissimilarity between Man and God of Lateran IV provides a notion of the political that is necessarily neutralised and evacuated of theological portent. In spite of the originating petrine dispensation that guarantees sovereign authority, the papacy declares a mode to the separation of politics from the Divine. It does this by casting language and events in the creaturely world as irreparably estranged from God. Language and history, then, conform to human logic and must be understood as coherent in those terms. The problem of the pure impurity of the political is not one that belongs to modernity alone, and neither does the neutralising strategy of its management. Instead, as Derrida points out, the condition of the political is defined by the impossibility of the merging of the action and ideal: ‘the concrete finally remains, in its purity, out of reach’ (Derrida 1997: 117).

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Mottu, H. 1977. La Manifestation de l’Esprit selon Joachim de Fiore. Paris: Labor & Fides.

Mouffe, C. 1999. The Challenge of Carl Schmitt. London: Verso.

Mouffe, C. 2000. The Democratic Paradox, London: Verso.

Ottaviano, C. 1934. Joachimi abbatis Liber contra Lombardum (Scuola di Gioacchino da Fiore). Rome: Reale Accademia d’Italia.

Reeves, M. 1969. The Influence of Prophecy in the later Middle Ages. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Robb, F. 1997. ‘The Fourth Lateran Council’s Definition of Trinitarian Orthodoxy’. Journal of Ecclesiastical History 48, 22–43.

Roseman, P. 2004. Peter Lombard. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Rothwell, H. 1975. English Historical Documents: 1189–1327. New York: Oxford University Press.

Schmitt, C. 1976. The Concept of the Political. Translated by G. D. Schwab. New Brunswick: Rutgers University.

Schmitt, C. 1985. Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. Translated by G. D. Schwab. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Schmitt, C. 1993. ‘The Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations’. Translated by M. Konzell and J. E. McCormick. Telos 96, 130–142.

Schmitt, C. 1996. Roman Catholicism and Political Form. Translated by G. L. Ulmen. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

Southern, R. 1995 and 2001. Scholastic Humanism and the Unification of Europe. Two volumes. Oxford: Blackwell.

Tanner, N. 1990. Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils. London: Sheed & Ward.

Thompson, A. 2005. ‘The Spectrality of Politics’. In Deconstruction and Democracy: Derrida’s Politics of Friendship. London: Continuum, 148–160

Wendelborn, G. 1974. Gott und Geschichte: Joachim von Fiore und die Hoffnung der Christenheit. Vienna: Bohlau.

¹ David Nirenberg, of Johns Hopkins University and the University of Chicago, provided my first experience of Carl Schmitt in his graduate seminar at Hopkins. I dedicate this article to him. Gaby Spiegel also from the Johns Hopkins Univerisity, read this in her customary generous and scouring manner, and made some very helpful suggestions. In addition, I would like to thank the School of Historical Studies at Monash University for listening to, and commenting upon, this paper. In particular, Jane Drakard, Constant Mews, Michael Hau and Barbara Caine provided useful comments in a gentle environment. And of course, many thanks to Dimitris Vardoulakis for his always sage advice.

² See Schmitt (1993). For one pertinent discussion of this work, see Thompson (2005).

³ Most famously, see Agamben (1998). See also Agamben (2005). Chantal Mouffe has also made significant use of Schmitt, see Mouffe (1999; 2000).

⁴ Alberigo (1972): ‘quia inter creatorem et creaturam non potest tanta similitudo notari, quin inter eos maior sit dissimilitudo notanda’. Translated in Rothwell (1975: 645).

⁵ On Lateran IV, see Mews and Monagle (2010). See also Robb (1997) and Marion (2002).

⁶ An excellent introduction to negative theology can be found in Milem (2007).

⁷ Alberigo (1972: 232): ‘claves ecclesiae, quas ipse concessit apostolis et eorum successoribus Iesus Christus’. Translated in Rothwell (1975: 644).

⁸ The standard edition of the Sententiae is Peter Lombard (1971–1981). On Lombard see Colish (1994). This work remains the most extensive and authoritative treatment of Lombard’s life and career in any language. The best general introduction is Rosemann (2004).

⁹ For a general introduction to the historiography of intellectual heresy between 1050 and 1150 see Southern (1995; 2001), Fichtenau (1992), and Le Goff (1985).

¹⁰ Peter Lombard (1971–1981: 72): ‘An Christus secundum quod homo est sit persona vel aliquid’. Translated in Rosemann (2004: 131).

¹¹ Alberigo (1972: 231): ‘sed quasi collectivam et similitudinarium esse fatetur, quemadmodum dicuntur multi homines unus populus, et multi fideles una ecclesia’. Translated in Rothwell (1975: 644).

¹² On Joachim see Reeves (1969), Wendelborn (1974), Daniel (1980), and Mottu (1977).

¹³ Alberigo (1972: 232): ‘Nos autem, sacro et universali concilio approbante, credimus et confitemur cum Petro, quod una quaedam summa res est, incomprehensibilis quidem et ineffabilis, quae veraciter est Pater et Filius et Spiritus Sanctus, tres simul personae ac sigillatim quaelibet earundum, et ideo in Deo Trinitas est solummodo non quaternitas’. Translated in Rothwell (1975: 644).

¹⁴ Alberigo (1972: 232): ‘quae sola est universorum principium, praeter quod aliud inveniri non potest’. Translated in Rothwell (1975: 644).

¹⁵ Alberigo (1972: 232): ‘quia inter creatorem et creaturam non potest tanta similitudo notari, quin inter eos maior sit dissimilitudo notanda’. Translated in Rothwell (1975: 645).

¹⁶ In Tanner (1990) cum petro, in this context, is translated as ‘with Peter Lombard’. An anonymous late thirteenth century treatise against Peter Lombard also reads cum petro as ‘with Peter Lombard’. See Ottaviano (1934).