Ernst Kantorowicz’s Synthronos: New Perspectives on Medieval Charisma

Abstract

In this text, the author analyzes the notion of charisma that appears implicitly in the medieval political theology of Ernst H. Kantorowicz. The text to be analyzed is Synthronos, a manuscript from 1951 on the iconography of the sharing-throne between gods and kings, which the author was unable to publish before he died. The notion of charisma is surveyed in St. Paul’s theology of grace and Max Weber’s sociology of dominion in order to find a third way to broaden the definition of charisma. Finally, a new perspective is proposed, based on literary and artistic representations, along with visual rhetoric, as driving forces of the ruler’s gifts.

“Weber once said that we can judge ‘the honesty of a contemporary scholar’ by his intellectual ‘posture towards Nietzsche and Marx.’”

(Baumgarten 1964, pp. 504–5)

1. Introduction

Some notable recent contributions to the topic (Herrero 2015; Bedos-Rezak and Rust 2018; Doyno 2019; Aurell 2022) have prompted reflection on how easily a phenomenon such as charisma can be encapsulated in one or several theoretical positions alone; on whether its semantic origin can be ascribed to the work of one or several authors; or, in this text, if it is possible to enclose the notion of medieval charisma and thus open up new historiographical horizons. The philosophical, semantic, historical–political, sociological, anthropological–cultural, psychological, and iconographic complexity of this phenomenon may lean towards encapsulating it in some way. However, I am also reluctant to think that it can be easily confined without resorting to simplifications or literalist and philological interpretations of the sources of the concept. This topic deserves a more open exploration, with a better future, and less conditioned by doctrinal or school ideologies.

Without going immediately into the vast bibliographical apparatus available on the concept (for example: Camic 1980; Bensman and Givant 1975; Conger 1989), it can be said at the outset that charisma is a kind of divine force that some people possess and that enables them to influence others. A person with charisma has a superior power in all cultures, and this allows them to exert an action on things and people through words, images, or body gestures.

At first glance, charisma is an interdisciplinary, historical (but also trans-historical), political, religious, and cultural phenomenon. Perhaps the first scholar to see connections between charisma and cultural explanation was Talcott Parsons in The Structure of Social Action (Parsons 1937). Though it seems difficult to encapsulate, many have tried, without being able to escape either the theological attraction of the concept of grace (that elevates nature) in St. Paul, or the magnetism of its formulation from Max Weber’s social science (Weber [1922] 1947; Fleischmann 1964; Smith 2021; Durkheim 1912). In this text, I would like to ask myself whether there are only these two options: either charisma is a special gift received from God, or it is a captivating charm that enables the development of political and religious leadership tasks.

It is possible that Ernst Kantorowicz’s1 work on medieval political theology might help to explore a middle way between St. Paul and Weber. I understand the difficulties involved, the prejudices both for and against his work, in embarking on this path of analyzing the history of ideas, and in this case charisma, from his concept of political theology in the Middle Ages. But I am confident of its merits, and perhaps it would be unwise to dismiss it. It is still a valid interlocutor in a present that is immersed in simultaneous processes of accelerated secularization and sacralization.

To this end, I am going to place special emphasis on the reading of his text “ΣΨNΘPONOΣ. ON THRONE-SHARING OF GODS AND MEN”, which is based on a paper read at Dumbarton Oaks on 5 April 1951 and was to have been the first of the “Studies Eastern and Western in the History of Late Classical and Mediaeval Ideas” (Kantorowicz 1951c). The series was to have included the following other titles: “Roman Coins and Christian Rites”, “Epiphany and Coronation”, “Charles the Bald and the Natales Caesarum”, and “Roma and the Coal”. Kantorowicz was able to correct the proofs of this text before his death on 9 September 1963. In accordance with his wishes, plans to publish the other studies in the series would be abandoned, although they could be cited occasionally.

I will present this analysis in four distinct parts. First, I will discuss the notion of charisma in Kantorowicz’s text and other work relevant to the concept. Next, I will explain the theoretical context in which Kantorowicz developed his idea of charisma, even when he never used this word explicitly. The third part will be dedicated to explaining the notion of representation as a key to Kantorowicz’s understanding of medieval charisma, in contrast to early Christian religious and modern sociological ideas. Finally, I will propose the methodological position of Kantorowicz’s notion of charisma in counterpoint to those of St. Paul2 and Max Weber (for example: Weber 1968; Dow 1978; Haley 1980; Bell 2004; Adair-Toteff 2015, 2020; Heurtin 2019). If the result is successful, I will have been able to show a middle way, so that the definition of charisma itself may have been supplemented or extended, especially as applied to the medieval period.3 It is important to clarify that I do not have a philological interest in researching the word “charisma” in the texts of Kantorowicz, but the concept. I will not trace an archaeology of charisma as a linguistic term in Eka’s work, but a conceptual genealogy and development of this very idea in the Middle Ages.

For the reader, this text will be a quite long journey, which may be difficult to simplify in a less extensive adventure or a less intricate structure. Sometimes the branches of this thick tree may seem to grow arbitrarily and, in some way, draw shadows to the piece as a whole. However, so long as the reader perseveres with an increasing interest, it can be progressively seen how everything returns to the basic hypotheses and recovers a sort of final enlightening that allows understanding everything.

2. The Notion of Charisma in Kantorowicz’s Synthronos

When I decided to study the manuscript “Synthronos”. On throne-sharing of gods and men” (Figure 1), my intention was twofold. First, it was to study the phenomenon of medieval charisma through one of its privileged objects: the throne. I thought that the concept of throne-sharing would help me to understand the definition of charisma by exploring the possibility that by sharing the throne, charisma could also be shared. Second, I wanted to ascertain the validity of certain historiographical positions on medieval charisma that postulated its double root, almost exclusively in the writings of St. Paul and Max Weber’s definition of charisma.

This essay is a typewritten, double-spaced, 67-page text on white folio with 129 bibliographical and explanatory notes after the text (Kantorowicz 1951c, pp. 823–87). Quotations or expressions in Greek have been added by the author after the English text with a Greek typewriter, as well as some handwritten corrections. Pagination is top right 1–33 (for the text) and 1*–31* (for the notes). After an introduction (fol. 1–6), it is divided into different parts: 1. Kings throne-sharers of Gods (fol. 6–17); 2. The Dead as throne-sharers of God (fol. 17–25); and 3. Christos Synthronos (fol. 25–33).

An early version of Synthronos (6 December 1945) is held in the Bancroft Library in Berkeley,4 and the text I use is the 1951 one kept at the Leo Baeck Institute in New York. This means that the ideas in this paper were being developed between WWII or earlier and the 1950s or later: some ten years of thinking about the problem of how the Antique custom of the king sharing the throne with gods in a frontal position and, once Christianized, how the Son and the Father could have the same substance, so that both might sit on the same throne, too. In fact, Eka wrote to Fritz Saxl: in the summer of 1945: “I had afforded myself a strepsis in the summer and as a result I did not get as far as I wanted with my work. In fact, I should have finished the first part of a volume “Studies in Political Liturgy”, which I give the subtitle ‘West-Eastern Studies’, because the three studies (‘Synthronos’, ‘Roma and the Coal’, ‘Epiphany and Coronation’ together with an epilogue) deal with the Byzantine-West”. (Figure 1).

The 1951 Synthronos text had a before and an after in Kantorowicz’s mind. His 1927 biography of Emperor Frederick II (Kantorowicz 1927, 1931; Abulafia 1977) had been a bestseller, and The King’s Two Bodies (Kantorowicz 1957)5 achieved classic status in Germany somewhat later, as elsewhere. Between these two, EKa (i.e., Kantorowicz) studied the cultural and political influences through the liturgical unity between the three Norman Churches—Normandy, England, and Sicily (Kantorowicz 1941); the noiseless influence of Plato in the Middle Ages (Kantorowicz 1942a); the liturgy as one of the most important auxiliaries to the study of medieval history (Kantorowicz 1942b, 1946); the synthronismoi of two or three emperors in Antiquity, frontally aligned, and their relationship to later images of the Christian Trinity. He also turned his focus to sharing the same throne, the status of the Glorified co-equal with that of the Father and the difficulty of representing at once the two natures and yet avoiding their “frontal” meeting in the same image (Kantorowicz 1947); the old right of the ruler to demand not only the property, but also, ad usuim publicum, the lives of the citizens, as a new manifestation of the contemporary disenchantment of the world (Kantorowicz 1951b); the Dantean metaphor of the two suns (empire and papacy of equal rank) (Kantorowicz 1951a); the secularization of the feudal vassalitic oath (Kantorowicz 1954); and the origins of the absolute state in the medieval background of the concept “Mysteries of State” (Kantorowicz 1955). Other texts dealing with very original topics and deep historical insight were published in this period (Y. M. 1964, p. 8), while yet others remained unpublished, such as Synthronos.6

In 1957, EKa published TKTB (The King’s Two Bodies), which was to contain many of the previous topics in a synthesis inspired by Edmund Plowden’s concept of the “two bodies” of the king (see infra). This is thus how Synthronos was inserted into the evolutive magma of his texts in the thirty years between 1927 and 1957.

2.1. What Is Throne-Sharing?

The introduction (fol. 1–6) begins with an exemplification of the concept of synthronos by explaining the death, possibly tragic, in CE 130 of Antinous, a lover of the emperor Hadrianus, who was subsequently deified and incorporated into the tradition of the kings of the Ptolemaic dynasty, keepers of the tradition of Pharaonic Egypt.

A number of examples in art and literature allow the author to underline the political, rather than poetic, meaning of the term: the investiture of the commander of the Sassanid king’s guard; Aides as throne-mate of Zeus (according to Sophocles); Pan, called in the Orphic Hymns “throne–sharer” of the Horae; and others.

Finally, in this introduction, EKa discusses the notions of isotheos (adding to statues of gods other statues of the same material and size, representing the monarch) and synnaos (sharing the temple or altar of the gods, as a synonym for synthronos). This episode consequently serves him to didactically introduce the notion of synthronos as the one who shares the throne with the gods, whose cult or semi-cult is connected with the cult of the ruler not only in Egypt, but throughout the Hellenistic world.

Thinking analogically helps to understand this introduction to synthronos as a preliminary key to categorizing charisma in different senses.7 Firstly, the throne serves to connect the above with the below, gods with men. The gods invite men to share their divine status, and men are deified in the act of being incorporated into the throne. To share the throne is to share the benefit of a personified godhood (in action), or charisma. For men, the benefit of being as gods is the charisma, which is what is shared with them.

Secondly, it follows from this introduction that, for EKa, it is not only the person of the god or man that is important, but also their visual or literary representation. It is relevant that the word synthronos is being used in literature, just as it is important that it can be artistically visual. Sharing the throne is not charismatic if it is not known literarily or perceived artistically. Third, there is a cultural continuity among the Antique, Hellenistic, and Christian notion of sharing the throne with God. There may be differences from the point of view of the morphology of religions; however, the concept of charisma as the “shared representation” of God’s virtues by men does not vary.

2.2. Kings as Gods

Later in the text, “1. Kings throne-sharers of Gods” (fol. 6–17) discusses at length the case of Philip II of Macedon at the marriage ceremony of his daughter Cleopatra at Aigai in 336 BCE Here, the images of the Twelve Gods seated on their thrones are carried according to custom into the theater, where the thirteenth statue of the king is added as synthronos, of the same size and material as those of the other twelve. As regards Alexander the Great, he is only recorded as living on the throne of the gods in the Alexander Romance of Pseudo-Callisthenes. But even though this royal style is well attested, perhaps in later times it may only reflect the relative popularity of that term around CE 300, when this work was composed. Kantorowicz cites other examples in relation to Alexander’s successors in Egypt.

Kantorowicz is unsurprised by the fact that the synthronos with the gods comes from the Pharaonic tradition, as is the case with some monuments of the New Empire, such as the temple cella (inner chamber) at Medinet Habu (Thutmose III, 18th Dynasty: 1501–1447), who shares a throne with Amon (Figure 2), or a similar statue in the temple of Amon at Karnak. He also shows that the Hellenistic kings of Egypt of the Ptolemaic dynasty continued the Pharaonic tradition of synnaos and synthronos, though less frequently.

For the author, the most impressive example of royal throne-partnership with the gods is the great monument and inscription of the sanctuary, which Antiochus of Commagene established in the fourth decade of the first century BCE on the summit of Mount Nemrud. The ruins of the hierothesion (holy seat) on Nemrud Dagh show the colossal figures sitting side by side on their thrones (Figure 3). Zeus is the central figure, with personified Commagene at his right side and King Antiochus at his left, throne-sharers who are in turn flanked by Apollo and Heracles, respectively.

The technical term synthronos rarely appears in the language of the cult of Roman emperors, and its Latin equivalent, consessor, has a vague meaning and is hardly found in pre-Christian times. But for EKa, this does not imply that a throne-community of Roman emperors and princes with gods was beyond Roman imagination.

I mentioned above the example of the marriage ceremony of Cleopatra, daughter of Philip II of Macedon (Lane Fox 2011). In this case, EKa underlines a concept that helps to understand his idea of charisma. In the procession of thrones of the Twelve Gods, the thirteenth statue of the king is “of the same size and material” as the other twelve. The author accepts and footnotes8 the idea of theoprepes that Fritz Taeger uses in his book (1957–1960), which is translated by dignum deo and means “That which is fitting to a god or worthy of a god” (Dreyer 1970; Van der Horst 2006, p. 129).

In this context, charisma is a representation of what is worthy of God. This idea, biblically based and, moreover, dogmatized by Philo of Alexandria (Van der Horst 2006, pp. 130–31), helps EKa to further nuance the concept: “The king in natura presided over the show, the king in effigie—so to say, his numen—was seated in the midst of the gods to watch the performance as a throne-sharing thirteenth.”9 EKa thus equates the meaning of (doubled-) numen10 and charisma from the point of view of a representation of power, which, equal to God, the king exercises from the same level. A little further on, we will see that, already in the Christian context, not every charisma can be totally shared: the Son will share it with the Father as an equal and, following St. Paul, the Christian will be “son in the Son” by grace.

2.3. Charisma and Death

In the second part (“2. The Dead as Throne-sharers of Gods”, fol. 17–25), EKa notes a special triangle among gods, kings, and the dead, the common denominator of which is heroes. Tertullian devoted a whole treatise to the crown as an insignia and stressed correctly that the dead were crowned as a sign of their deification or, as he put it, “because they become idols as soon as they are dead both by their attire and by the service of consecration”. The throne became an insignia of their heroization or deification after death because the exalted dead would be visualized as privileged “partners of the seats of the gods below.”

The great metamorphosis of eschatological belief, however, was brought about in the Hellenistic age when the human mind was conquered by the doctrine, according to which man’s soul might ascend to the skies to become immortal among the stars or gods. The idea of a throne-partnership with the gods began to move away from the nether regions and to seek its materialization in the regions above. To certain gnostic schools, however, whose teaching may well be called a Christianized equivalent of the mysteries, an other-worldly throne-sharing of the dead with secondary deities was known. The notion of passage in the Stromata of Clement of Alexandria renders Christian thought, too.

In this second part of Synthronos, EKa implicitly refers to aspects of charisma that are crucial in medieval political theology: 1. the funerary element that unfolds in the idealization of the deceased monarch, 2. the charismatic presentism dependent on an eschatological future, and 3. the concept of transit to the afterlife that reinforces the charisma of the protagonist.

The death of the king is a key fact for understanding the notion of charisma in Kantorowicz. The doctrine of the king’s two bodies was devised during the reign of Elizabeth I (1558–1603) and can be found in the account of cases from that period by the jurist Edmund Plowden (Fortin 2021, p. 3). For TKTB, EKa chooses as a starting point the Plowden Reports (Figure 4), from which he will extract some of the most revealing passages of the arguments and judgments pronounced in the royal courts (Plowden 1816).11 In these Reports, we find the first clear elaboration of that mystique of discourse, with which the jurists of the English crown enveloped and embellished their definitions of kingship and their sovereign powers (Kantorowicz 1957, p. 7).

They are important for our essay because, in fact, the concept of charisma in relation to the death of the king will derive from texts from the Plowden Reports:

“The King has two Capacities, for he has two Bodies, the one whereof is a Body natural, consisting of natural Members as every other Man has, and in this he is subject to Passions and Death as other Men are; the other is a Body politic, and the Members thereof are his Subjects, and he and his Subjects together compose the Corporation (…) and he is incorporated with them, and they with him, and he is the Head, and they are the Members, and he has the sole Government of them; and this Body is not subject to Passions as the other is, nor to Death, for as to this Body the King never dies, and his natural Death is not called in our Law (…), the Death of the King, but the Demise of the King, not signifying by the Word (Demise) that the Body politic of the King is dead, but that there is a Separation of the two Bodies, and that the Body politic is transferred and conveyed over from the Body natural now dead, or now removed from the Dignity royal, to another Body natural. So that it signifies a Removal of the Body politic of the King of this Realm from one Body natural to another”.

(Plowden 1816, p. 233a; Kantorowicz 1957, p. 13)

The expression “the king never dies” means that his charisma never dies either. That is why the word “demise” (transference, passing away, passing out, fading away, transition) is an efficient euphemism for the idea that, after the death of the physical body, the body politic is “suspended”, and pending to join a new biological organism, while not dying as such.

It is interesting to think that charisma is not even suspended because it is not just a body politic. What is more, with the death of the biological body, the charisma is maintained or reinforced, precisely thanks to the absence of the physical person and the corruption of the material. In funeral ceremonies, funerary monuments, and burial mounds, while awaiting the new king, charisma bridges the gap between the mortal physical and the immortal political.

The funerary monument, the liturgy, and the chronicles of the king’s death act as a literary and artistic support for the charisma, which is understood as the personal energy of the ruler that survives his physical body and nourishes the body politic awaiting a new investiture. In the removal of the body politic between one physical body (that of the king who dies) and another (the one that succeeds him), the charisma sustains everything, helping the united subjects to continue composing the Corporation.12

2.4. Christian Charisma

When EKa reaches the third part of his essay (“3. Christos Synthronos”, fol. 25–33), he notices that no verse of the Old Testament was quoted so often and so significantly in the New as Psalm 109, the decisive passage announcing the royal or messianic throne-partnership with Jehovah: “The Lord said unto my Lord: Sit thou at my right hand, until I make thine enemies thy footstool”. This verse is referred to so authoritatively in the Gospels, and is repeated or alluded to so often in the apostolic writings, that the celestial throne-companionship of the Son of man with God the Father is explained sufficiently by the Psalter alone.

The decisive factor is not the influence of divine kingship in the ancient Near East as a basis for Hellenistic ruler worship (Carlyle [1841] 1891). It is rather the difference between both Jewish and Hellenistic concepts of human–divine throne-partnership on the one hand, and the image of Christ sharing the throne of the Father on the other. In the Psalm, no matter whether it be interpreted “historically” or “messianically”, the throne-sharing of the Lord that is addressed with the Lord that speaks is, as it were, “absolute” and not determined by time. The same is true with regard to the throne-sharing of Hellenistic kings: they are not bound to a definite moment in the life of the ruler, and it does not have any consequences with regard to other men.

The applications of Psalm 109 in the New Testament, however, deviate from both the Israelite and the Hellenistic traditions insofar as the throne–sharing of the Messiah, the Son of man, with God the Father is bound to a specific moment in the life of Jesus and the history of the human race. The sitting of the man Jesus on the right side of God the Father appears as an ultimate goal, as the last consequence of a tragedy, the last scene of a terrifying drama, which began on earth with the incarnation and ended in the crucifixion, the resurrection, and the ascension to heaven. The ensuing synthronismos, therefore, is meant to appear as the last station of a long journey.

Neither in the tradition of Israel nor in that of Hellenistic kingship has the element of time been effective in the assertion of a throne–fellowship with a god. Jewish Apocalyptic ideas of throne-sharing were primarily messianic and beyond time, whereas Hellenistic ideas were primarily individual and mythical, and without time.

Philo and Origen had used it in a figurative sense. Clement of Alexandria visualized a throne-sharing with the deuteroi in the life thereafter for those endowed with gnosis. Eusebius of Caesarea, however, uses the term not only casually or figuratively, but transfers the Hellenistic title of honor almost systematically to Christ. Few authors, it is true, have so consistently designated Christ as the synthronos of the Father as Eusebius, who thereby added a Hellenistic cultic–constitutional note to the fundamentals of Christian faith. Gregory Nazianzen, in his diatribe against Emperor Julian, refers to Christ as “the great Father’s Son and Logos and high priest and synthronos.”13

This leads us to another thought in EKa’s notion of charisma in the Christian concept, typically medieval. Christological charisma is eschatological within a linear and chronological history of salvation.14 Charisma is thus linked to the earthly human nature of Christ, though united to the heavenly divinity. Charisma is not only social—in the ecclesiological sense that the Church is a society—but also ontological. This means that charisma is historical and trans-historical, social and trans-social, human and divine at the same time. This is shown in the tripartite meaning of the last judgement in two Carolingian manuscripts, the San Paolo Bible and the Trier Bible, where the linear meaning of Cristian time is clear (Figure 5): the four figures below, the princes spiritual and secular, the uppermost plane with a sphere “above all heavens”, and the middle plane a sphere below heaven, but reaching “unto the sky” (Kantorowicz 1957, p. 76 and Figure 5).

In its historical form, it is represented by both the anthropomorphic image of Christ himself and the institutional image of the Church as his mystical body; trans-historically, his charisma will clearly be seen: not as in a mirror, but face to face (1Cor. 13.12), “For now we are looking in a mirror that gives only a dim (blurred) reflection [of reality as in a riddle or enigma], but then [when perfection comes], we shall see in reality and face to face! Now I know in part (imperfectly), but then I shall know and understand fully and clearly, even in the same manner as I have been fully and clearly known and understood [by God]” (Bible 1958).

The specific iconography of the side wound of Christ is a metaphor for the unity between the two temporal dimensions of the physical body of Christ and his mystical–institutional body (the Church). Following the spirit of Synthronos, medieval charisma can be expressed through the physiological wound of Christ united to its ecclesiological dimension as the fountain of the sacraments; it was not simply “struck” by a lance, but rather “opened” to the new life of grace in the Church. Christ on the cross points to his own side wound as the fountain of life before the kneeling donors and his angels at the Prayer Book of Bonne of Luxembourg (Figure 6).15

The reader of Synthronos will be left in no doubt about three important ideas: first, that it is a text of political theology; second, that the throne is a typical object of charisma; and third, that the charismatic leader must be invited to share the throne of the gods, because having charisma is not the same standing up as sitting down. This allows us to summarize, before continuing, Kantorowicz’s essential ideas on charisma as contained in Synthronos.

The concept of charisma comes from the most ancient civilizations, such as Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Israel. The energy of charisma springs, in the first instance, from the gods, who only later can invite some humans to share it on their throne. This concept is subsequently Hellenized in Greek and Roman culture with a new nuance in the form of a more sophisticated mythological narrative. Equalizing with statues of the same proportion and material as the gods (isotheos), sharing the temple or altar with the gods (synnaos), and sitting on the same throne (synthronos) are consequences derived from charisma, in which the gods attract and make men their equals because they are all-powerful.

When charisma is Christianized, thanks to grace, men can be made equal to Christ as God–man by participating in his relationship with the Father and the Holy Spirit. However, Christian charisma is historical because it is produced in the linear evolution of the history of salvation, particularly in the Middle Ages. Christian charisma has sort of two bodies in Christ: Church, as his mystical and institutional body, and mankind, as his same-nature human incorporation.

There are, however, differences among Hellenistic, Jewish, and Christian charisma. The first is mainly individual and mythical, and timeless; the second is mainly messianic and beyond time; and the third is a final goal, such as the last consequence of a tragedy, the last scene of a terrifying drama. But in all three cases, charisma requires literary or artistic representation.16 This is the central concept in Kantorowicz’s definition of medieval charisma, which could be formulated as “the personal representation of a visible force which enables the leader to act on other men as if he or she was God himself.”

EKa’s text reflects most of the characteristics of his mature work in three significant ways: (a) temporally, because he covers a wide historical range, from Ancient Egypt to the High Middle Ages; (b) spatially, by developing a strong side interest in the Near and Middle East; and (c) disciplinary, along the scale of scholarly disciplines, as he becomes immersed in archeology (including numismatics), art history, legal history, the history of religion, and the history of ideas (Cf. Y. M. 1964, p. 1).

As on so many occasions, the most difficult thing he manages to do is to choose a term, whose philological origin traces back to a remote past, and to overcome the gravitational force of anachronism. He takes the idea of a “shared throne” through the tunnel of time, explaining all its metamorphoses and the common denominator of all the epochs it has crossed. He finds the idea of gods inviting men to sit beside them as equals fascinating. In choosing the concept of synthronos, he finds himself on a terrain that is familiar to him: that of the faint boundary separating the sphere of the sacred and the profane. EKa already has the intuition that the profane tends to be sacralized, while the sacred tends to be secularized, and seeks its crystallizations in literature, history, art, and law. He shows again that there are many concepts of medieval political theology that come from very far away.

He searches in the Egyptian and Mesopotamian world for the biblical idea of the Psalms, in which the God of Israel calls his son to sit at his side. As soon as he finds these coincidences of form and content in Antiquity, he embarks on the interpretation with a powerful discourse and a new pedagogy. In this case, he reveals to the reader three ways of conceiving the idea of synthronos: the Hellenistic, the Hebrew, and the Christian. Here again, his hermeneutic approach is the search for the hybridization among different, sometimes contradictory things, which claim to be harmonized. First, he attracts the reader with a resemblance—for example, the presence of the Father and the Son on the same throne of salvation. Immediately, without becoming suspicious of a false dialectic, he provokes the conflict—a God who invites a man to sit with him... who at the same time is as much God as He is! —and inserts the conflict of the Christological subordinationism of Arius and his followers.

Finally, in Synthronos, as in many of his writings, the formal structure is clear, the use of primary and secondary sources is very precise, the visual documentation he cites is sufficiently illustrative, and his speculative standard brilliant. It is not surprising that, years after it was written, this text, which EKa did not see published, maintains its hermeneutic potential virtually intact.

3. Charisma as Representation

In EKa’s work, charisma considered as representation means three stages of presence of a political substance: perspectus, corpus, and persona.

3.1. Representation Based on Perspectus

The Latin verb perspicere comes from per- and speciō, -ere. It means to examine carefully, to look attentively; to examine mentally, study, investigate; to see or look through; to distinguish with the eye, to discern, to perceive; to have or become aware of something, to distinguish with the mind, to recognize (Glare 1983). It is clear that this word involves a physical and a mental approach to reality. The literal translation “to perspective” (sic) is more than “to see” or “to look”: it implies visual understanding. This is an aspect of EKa’s notion of representation of charisma.

When Erwin Panofsky explained in 1927 how the Renaissance mathematical perspective worked, he used the metaphor of a crime. Following this, pictorial perspective was the scenario of the crime committed by the characters involved in the scene. W. J. T. Mitchell commented on this in the following terms: “To ‘see’ the crime, we need to remove the figures from the stage and examine the stage itself, the space of vision and recognition, the very ground which allows the figures to appear. The presentation of this empty stage, the foundational image of all possible visual–spatial culture, is precisely what Panofsky offers in the perspective essay”17 (Mitchell 1994, p. 31).

Panofsky’s paper “makes a double (and contradictory) argument about Renaissance perspective: first, that it is simply part of one particular culture and has the same status as other modes of spatial depiction developed within other cultures”. Second, that it “provides an absolute viewpoint for interpreting other constructions” (Podro 1982, p. 196). Perspective is a figure for what we would call ideology—a historical, cultural formation that masquerades as a universal, natural code. The continuum of “homogeneous infinite space” (Podro 1982, p. 187) and the bipolar reduction to a single viewpoint at the “subjective” and “objective” ends of pictorial space provide the structure or space in which Panofsky’s three-dimensional iconology makes sense. Representation embodies these two aspects: reality as seen and reality as it is.

Perspective is thus both a mere symptom and the diagnostic synthesis, which allows interpretation to be scientific and symptoms to be made intelligible. “Perspective made a promising case study not because it described the world correctly, but because it described the world according to a rational and repeatable procedure”. This is what Panofsky means when he calls perspective the “objectification of the subjective” (Panofsky [1927] 1991, p. 65) or “the carrying over of artistic objectivity into the domain of the phenomenal” (Panofsky [1927] 1991, p. 72). Perspective encourages a strange kind of identification of the art-object with the world-object. It is perspective, after all, that makes the metaphor of a Weltanschauung, a worldview, possible in the first place (Panofsky 1991, p. 13).

Perspective is a way of representation both objective (scientific) and subjective (cultural): it is both physical and ideological. This means, in EKa’s case, that it is both the “presence” and “absence” of political power. It is a visual or literary device to be taken into account. It is both a marketing strategy (we are induced to look at a symptom) and an ontological presence (a synthesis). This leads to the thought that in EKa’s medieval political theology, charisma is both subjective and relative, but also objective and absolute. That is something different from a simple theology of grace (Pauline) or a recognizable sociological structure (Weberian). All this involves the fact that EKa’s notion of synthronos does not only mean visibly sharing the throne with God (as pre-iconographical), but also being substantially another god or the same God (though iconological). Such is the power of representation in terms of Perspectus.

In his text “The Quinity of Winchester”, EKa presents the throne-sharing of the Luttrell Psalter based on Psalm 109: “The Lord said unto my Lord, Sit thou at my right hand, until I make thine enemies thy footstool”. The Lord that speaks is considered to be God the Father, and the Lord spoken to King David, the “historical” interpretation (David wearing a crown, Figure 7a) as opposed to the “messianic” (Christ with a halo, Figure 7b) on the Offices of Westminster. The commentators on the Psalm hold that David and Christ are almost interchangeable here. Qui filius Dei est, ipse et filius David est, writes Jerome. St. Augustine explains, Filius David secundum carnem, dominus David secundum divinitatem (Kantorowicz 1947, p. 75).

Both are representations of the synthronos, where “the Lord invites my Lord to seat”, and in both God’s charisma is shared. The two architectural seats or benches differ from the Albertian sense-developed perspective device in Italy,18 but they respond to a moment in its development when the Northern painters and book illuminators started absorbing the Italian innovations until, at the end of the fourteenth century, a state of equilibrium was reached (Panofsky 1966, p. 20).19 In these two cases (mid-14th century), the painters had arrived at a no less “correct” solution on a purely empirical basis—that is to say, not by deriving a workable construction from optical theory, but by subjecting shop traditions and direct visual experience to a consistent schematization (Panofsky 1966, p. 5).

In conclusion, representation was not only the geometry of a mathematical perspective, but also the conceptual penetration of the human gaze that made it possible to approach the literal meaning of the image (differences in wearing crown or halo) with its synthetic results: David is Christ and, therefore, the only God with the Father. Thanks thus to the power of representation, the energy of charisma was explained visually rather than just theologically (Paul) or sociologically (Weber). Perspective, whether infinite (mathematical, early modern) or finite (medieval), means that in the throne-sharing, one more human character is incorporated in the visual space of the god. This involves formal symptoms (pre-iconographical) and ontological syntheses. In this, Kantorowicz may be going further in the political theology language efficiency of charisma.

3.2. Representation Based on Corpus

Kantorowicz’s importance in the most recent debates on the political and historical meanings of the body20 is mainly due to Michel Foucault, who rediscovered the corpus metaphor in TKTB.21 As the American historian John B. Freed put it, Foucault “made Kantorowicz suddenly fashionable” (Freed 1999, p. 225ff, Quoted in Antenhofer 2016, p. 3). Also, Alain Boureau, the French historian and one of EKa’s biographers, coined the term “pre-Foucauldian” for TKTB as a monumental study of the strategies of “theatricalization” in the political regimes—i.e., France and England.22

In doing so, Boureau claimed that, as performed embodiments of the dual nature of monarchic authority, secular ceremonies—especially the funerals of kings—had too often been interpreted as having the same “real” consequences and effects as their religious analogies, e.g., in transubstantiation. Bodies and symbols must be preserved, shown, and surrounded by attentive considerations on behalf of powers. The monarchic rites submit to devotion those bodies of kings, and the tactics of power oblige them—natural bodies that they are—to join the perpetual body of the monarchy. Kantorowicz had really accustomed us to understanding the monarchic fiction of the two bodies of the king as individual participation in a perpetual transcendent reality, but Boureau takes up the question by operating a historical criticism of EKa’s proposal. The king’s body is thus not double, but simple (Cf. Boureau 1988, pp. 24–27).

This critique of Kantorowicz is interesting because it helps us to better understand the notion of charismatic representation as a middle way between the Pauline theological and the Weberian sociological. If for a moment we consider that the king has only one body (his physical, theatrical, dramatic, or aesthetic body) and not two (physical and political), we can better understand EKa’s own notion as a fusion of the two bodies of the king into one: the body of representation. The charismatic leader does not have power because he has only received a gift from heaven or because he is recognized by a social structure alone. The king is powerful because he is represented through his corpus that can perform tragic actions in public (Tindemans 2008). His actions are not just successive stages in social dramas, but more like rites of passage, which render them irreversible alone, their sequence being no illusion, and whose unidirectional movement is transformative (Cf. Turner 1982, p. 80).

In this charisma as representation, there must be a “threshold” or liminal phase of ritual, which is not just metaphor. Liminality must be regarded as a serious formulation of ritual as performance, because ritual lays stronger emphasis on the transformative action of “invisible or supernatural beings or powers regarded as the first and final causes of all effects”. Without taking liminality into account, ritual becomes indistinguishable from “ceremony”, “formality”, or what Barbara Myerhoff and Sadly Moore, in their Introduction to Secular Ritual (1977), indeed call “secular ritual”. The liminal phase is the essential, anti-secular component in ritual per se, whether it be labeled “religious” or “magical”. “Ceremony indicates, ritual transforms” (Turner 1982, p. 80).

Kantorowicz himself recognizes that “we may find ourselves involved in a tangle of intersecting, overlapping, and contradictory strands of political thought”, though all of them “somehow converge in the notion of Crown”. “The Crown, as the embodiment of all sovereign rights […] of the whole body politic, was superior to all its individual members, including the king, though not separated from them” (Kantorowicz 1957, p. 381).

An example may well help in understanding charisma as an “embodiment” of medieval kingship, with the crown as a special object itself. The legend of Moses throwing down Pharaoh’s crown and breaking it appears in a Dutch copy of the Speculum humanæ salvationis. The Speculum is an early fourteenth–century encyclopedic work on typology, a form of biblical exegesis, in which Old Testament events are interpreted as prefigurating those in the New Testament. This Mirror is drawn from Comestor, who gives its source as the Antiquitate judaica of Josephus (Cf. Morey 1993).

The scene on the right shows the shattered crown that the child Moses had thrown down at Pharaoh’s feet. A soldier prepares to slay him, but a servant holds out hot coals, and Moses proves his favor with God by putting one in his mouth without flinching or being burned (Figure 8). After destroying the symbol of Egypt’s sovereignty, the crown, Moses was saved by divine intervention so that he could eventually lead the Israelites out of captivity. This parallels the destruction of the Egyptian idols by the passage of the child Jesus, who was protected so that he could live to redeem mankind (Wilson and Wilson 1984, pp. 87, 163).

This broken pagan crown is in clear contrast to the scene on the left with Mary and the Child sitting on a throne, showing the integrity of the Mother of God’s (and the Church’s) crown. Both are exactly the same shape (Figure 9). There is a prefiguration of the child Moses as the child Jesus: the former plays with Pharaoh’s crown, which ends up broken, while the latter preserves the integrity of the Church’s crown. This original parallelism brings us back to TKTB’s consideration of the Crown:

“The Crown appeared also as a composite body, an aggregate of the king and those responsible for maintaining the inalienable rights of the Crown and the kingdom. As a perpetual minor, the Crown itself had corporational (sic) character … As Sir Francis Bacon put it, that king and Crown were ‘inseparable, though distinct.’ Another thing seems also to emerge quite clearly: that the Crown was rarely ‘personified’ but very often ‘cosified.’ Comparable to the corpus mysticum, the Crown was and remained a complex body, a body politic which was not separated from either its royal constituent as the head nor from those co-responsible for the status coronae as limbs”.

(Kantorowicz 1957, p. 382)

The destruction of Pharaoh’s crown prefigures the destruction of Israel’s enemies. Christ, by destroying the crown of the pagan kingdom, destroys its charisma, understood as the bodily representation of evil. On the other hand, the child Jesus in his mother’s arms and as a body mystically represented by his Church, of which Mary is also Mother, saves the physical integrity of the Crown of charisma. The mechanism of charisma as embodied representation is not only a social drama enacted in different phases, but a ritual of passage that transforms reality. The corporeal–representative dimension of the crown gives power an ontological charisma that unifies the crown as object and the Crown as an institution. Again, the ceremony indicates, but the ritual transforms.

3.3. Representation Based on the Persona

Both France and England thus succeeded in abolishing the “little interregnum” that arose between the king’s accession and coronation. The coronation ceremonial, of course, was not abandoned. It still remained a task of the Church to solemnize the important coronation oath. As an occasion for the display of courtly pomp and splendor, the coronation gained some new momentum. Coronations served as “the solemnization of the royal descent”, that is, as a medium for the manifestation of a dynasty-bound divine right. De facto, both France in 1270 and England in 1272 recognized that the succession to the throne was the birthright of the eldest son. Henceforth, the king’s true legitimation was dynastic, independent of approval or consecration on the part of the Church and also of election by the people. “The royal power, is from God and from the people electing the king in his person or in his house, in persona vel in domo” (Kantorowicz 1957, pp. 329–30).

This has implications for EKa’s concept of the representation of charisma. A different oil will be used, a different series of gestures performed, and a dissimilarity in the background is born: the king is only “as if” (he was) a bishop or Christ. But he is not exactly the same. Charisma is a representation not only in the field of symbols, but in the formal structure of the sacraments from the Holy Spirit. There is a real difference between a visual marketing strategy of power and an ontological distinction between the “represented” and the “non-represented”. Anointment had no sacramental value because “it left no imprint on the soul.”23 However, it was to prove useful in establishing an analogy between the formal structure of a sacrament celebration and the visual representation of a royal anointment.

As coronation ceremonies, sacraments have both matter (such as water in baptism) and form (set of words pronounced by the minister in administering the sacrament). In kingly coronations, matter is the chrism for anointment, but also the gloves, the sword, the royal cloak, and the crown. Form is the oath and other words used by the bishop or Pope for the consecration. In addition to this, medieval coronations finish with the sacrament of the eucharist in the holy communion by the king. That is why all these ritual objects (matter) stand on the altar of the holy mass (Figure 10).

A theological distinction may be useful to deepen the sacramental formal structure of the charisma considered as representation. Since the very early history of Church, sacramental acts are considered effective irrespective of the intentions and character of the principals. In general, it is worth bearing in mind that the action or effect produced by baptism and ordination is claimed to be so objective and permanent that it cannot be affected or effaced by any possible later change in the recipient’s disposition. This view was common in the Fathers and reprised later in the Council of Trent: “If anyone shall say that by the said sacraments of the New Law, grace is not conferred from the work which has been worked [ex opere operato], but that faith alone in the divine promise suffices to obtain grace: let him be anathema.”24

Ex opere operantis is a term mainly applied to the good dispositions with which a sacrament is received, to distinguish it from the ex opere operato, which is the built-in efficacy of a sacrament properly conferred. But it may refer to any subjective factor that at least partially determines the amount of grace obtained by a person who performs some act of piety. This doctrine was based in the Profession of Faith Prescribed for Durand of Osca and His Waldensian Companions from the letter “Eius exemplo” to the Archbishop of Terraco in 1208.25

To postulate that when the king receives a charisma, the formal structure is similar to the one of the sacraments, is also to imply two other facts: first, that the charisma is received as a gift from above; and second, that the charisma is also received depending on the good dispositions of the king. This would mean that the charisma as representation would also depend on the person to whom eventually it is given. There would be a charisma ex opere operato (with the faith alone in the divine promise that suffices to obtain grace) and ex opere operantis (depending on the good dispositions or qualities of the leader). This is also a new perspective to contrast with the Pauline supernatural objective gratuity approach (neither sacramental) and the Weberian structuralist proposal of leadership (probably anti-sacramental).

In EKa’s work, charisma is a representation that involves personalization or impersonation. “Innocent III granted to the bishops the anointment with chrism and on the head, but denied emphatically the same privilege to the prince. His arguments are interesting not only on account of the lowering of liturgical ceremonial, but also because they reveal a complete reversal of the former idea of Christ-like and Christ-centered kingship […] That is to say, in order to stress the dissimilarity with the anointment of Christ the anointment of the prince was removed from the head to arms and shoulders, and it was performed, not with holy chrism, but with lesser oil” (Kantorowicz 1957, p. 319). Above all, however, the prince was expressly refused a Christ-like representation or the character of a Christus Domini. On the bishop’s head, however, “the sacramental pouring has been retained because in his (episcopal) office, he, the bishop, represents the person of the Head (i.e., of Christ). There is a difference between the anointments of bishop and Prince: the bishop’s head is consecrated with chrism, whereas the arm of the prince is soothed with oil. Let it be shown how great is the difference between the authority of the bishop and the power of the prince” (Kantorowicz 1957, pp. 319–20).

The Coronation Book of King Charles V of France has different images that allow us to exemplify the difference between a Christ-like anointment (Pope or bishop) and a Prince-like one in the coronation ritual. The kings of France were traditionally anointed with oil from the Sainte Ampoule (Figure 11a), which legend held to have been angelically provided for the baptism of Clovis.26 But the oil for the unction of the queen is different (Figure 11b) in terms of the impersonation of charisma.27 The bishop represents the person of Christ-Head; the prince represents the extension of the person of Christ-members; and the queen represents the extension of the person of the king’s-members, her husband. Depending on the personae, the representation of charisma through the oil is different.

The sacramental formal structure of this representation is relevant to understanding the power of the notion of persona: Christ himself, the bishop–Christ, the king–bishop, the queen–king. Each one of these personae lives the reception of charisma ex opere operantis (adapted to the dispositions of the receiver). At the same time, the ex opere operato dimension changes in the matter (different categories of oil; different objects, such as crown, sword, gloves, cloak, etc.) and in the form (different words to be pronounced). Both the king and the queen will ultimately receive holy communion, but the sacramental formal structure changes due to the different nature of the corresponding personae. This is an obvious reason for the non-sharing of their thrones: the bishop’s cathedra, the king’s throne, and the queen’s chair—different personae, different charismas, different thrones.

The persona implies, then, two closely united dimensions. The subject of the coronation, bearer of the charisma, assumes a performative dimension. It is as if they are enacting a role in a play that embodies the investiture of power. In this aspect, the meaning of persona resembles the Greek notion of the theatrical mask. However, in the context of the Christian ritual of the coronation of the prince, the new mask or theatrical persona, without renouncing its function of representing a new role, has a transformative power that, by analogy, can function as a sacrament: it is an external, aesthetic sign, not only a performer, but also a transformer.

The second dimension is that the assumption of the theatrical mask by the prince effects in him, at the same time, an ontological transformation so that, ceasing to be who he was, he is sacredly invested by a charisma that will allow him to exercise power. It seems, then, that in this tragic–ontological dimension of the representation of charisma, the two bodies of the king are indissolubly united in his persona, which is both a selfhood and a new actor in the visual tragedy of the exercise of power.

4. The Theoretical Context in Kantorowicz’s Idea of Charisma

It is possible that my Synthronos analysis and the proposed definition of charisma in EKa seem naïve. It may also seem that I have a certain eagerness to coin a new or unprecedented definition and to unnecessarily modify the binary (St. Paul–Weber) picture that has already proved effective and accepted by scholars. I have endeavored to explain what my representation means in EKa’s medieval charismatic dimension. It is also necessary to attempt a brief, unified explanation of the critical context concerning the notion of charisma in St. Paul, Kantorowicz, and Max Weber.

4.1. St. Paul’s Theology of Grace

The idea of a “gift of grace” was expressed by the noun chen (grace or favor) in the Hebrew Old Testament. This term was usually translated charis in Greek. “The dominant idea”, as (Smith 1956; 1998, p. 36) explains, “is that God grants favor to the helpless and humble”, usually after personal invocation. The first influential writer to use the word charisma was Paul’s older contemporary, Philo Judaeus, who wrote that “All things in the world and the world itself are the donation and benefaction and gift of God” (Grieve [1914] 1951, p. 367).

Paul was a Hellenizing Jew to the extent that he lived among Greek–speaking communities of Jews and gentiles, wrote letters to them in Greek, and in doing so, employed both Hellenistic literary conventions and motifs from popular Stoic and Cynic wisdom. Although apparently descending from a prominent diaspora family who had acquired Roman citizenship (Mommsen 1901), his mother tongue, quite probably, was the Hebrew and Aramaic of Jerusalem (Van Unnik 1973). Furthermore, scholars argue a close material relationship between elements of Paul’s teaching and Pharisaic–Rabbinic tradition, together with the apocalyptic element, so that he can be called a “Hellenistic Pharisee” (Tomson 1990, p. 53).

Paul later refined and popularized the semantic usage of charisma in the typical New Testament meaning: “Charisma is the result of an act of grace, a favor. Grace is not an object, not some kind of ethereal substance” (Haley 1980, p. 26). Unlike other more generic terms, such as arché and dynamis, charisma conveys the idea not only of power, but also of the ethical dimension of an influence derived from a High God (Wink 1984). It is not merely power, but power given by the Holy Spirit: grace, not mere force. The Apostle elaborated this idea at a time when miracles and visions were reported everywhere. It is noticeable that the medieval illuminator of the Bible of Jean de Sy differentiates the working attitude of St Paul writing to the Corinthians (Figure 12a) from the charismatic mood of the spiritual leader when he delivers his letter to Timothy and gives him instructions (Figure 12b).

Paul’s epistles display a logic that seems homiletical and pastoral, rather than systematic, and they are as ad hoc letters written to various communities in different situations, addressed exclusively to non–Jews. They would reflect Paul’s faithfulness to the agreement with the Jerusalem Apostles, according to his own statement: Paul “had been entrusted with the gospel to the uncircumcised, just as Peter with that of the circumcised” (Gal 2.7). In other words, he wrote the extant letters within the boundaries of his specific mission to the gentiles and did not interfere with Peter’s mission to the Jews.

First Corinthians is not only remarkable among Paul’s letters for its “legal” and “Jewish” character, but also appears very much to reflect Paul’s own thinking and was recognized as such in the early Church (Tomson 1990). Paul refers to “spiritual matters” (pneumaticha) as charismata or “gifts” in 1Cor 12–14. Charisma is synonymous with another word found in early Christian tradition, doma (Mat 7.11, Lk 11.13, Eph 4.8, Phil 4.17), both having a Hebrew background.28 Paul discerns a range of charismata including teaching, prophesying, tongues, and healing (1Cor 12.28–31).29 In view of their community function and the connection with the Pentecost story (Acts 2), their background in Jewish tradition is evident (Tomson 1990, p. 78).

Following Paul’s concept of grace, God extends His charis to ungrateful enemies, while still maintaining the righteous demands of His honor. The prized status of righteousness—reserved for those doing good in Antiquity—is “democratized” and extended to the entire Christian community through Christ. Only the grace of Christ—in sharp contrast to the beneficence of the gods and human beings—is unilateral, not reciprocal (Harrison 2017, p. 287). This clearly means that we are in the context of gratuity: “Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse those who have leprosy, drive out demons. Freely you have received; freely give” (Mt 10.8).

Every believer, said Paul, is blessed with one of the many gifts of the Holy Spirit, the charismata, which endow their bearers with unique spiritual powers and responsibilities. This term remained in later centuries until Protestant theology in the nineteenth century shifted under the influence of Hegel, Schleiermacher, and the Biblical Higher Criticism of theologians, such as Graf and Baur. A deeply historical rationalism was now counterposed to the belief in miracles, going so far as to cast a chillingly objective eye on the very notion of “gifts of the Holy Spirit.”

4.2. The Rationalized Charisma

This brief analysis of the context of St. Paul’s notion of charisma can be used as the basis for a consideration of the relationship between Rudolf Sohm and Max Weber. Influenced by Sohm, Weber used the vocabulary of the theology of grace. Many readers, unfamiliar with the nature of Weber’s debt to theology, have thought that he, like Sohm, viewed charisma as a divinely given personal quality. However, Max Weber’s sociology of charisma is radically opposed to Sohm’s theology (Smith 1998, p. 32).

Sohm’s stress on reverence for authority coincides perfectly with the view that Weber depicted in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism in one of his earliest references to charisma.30 But the fabric that enfolds Sohm’s theology of charisma emphasizes “organization”, which is central to his vision. Far from opposing hierarchy, he hoped to sanctify it: “the true apostolic teaching on the structure of the ecclesia, drawn from God’s Word, is this, that Christendom is not a legal organization but rather a charismatic organization” (Smith 1998, p. 42).

For Sohm, Christian community “was not a democracy, ruled by the people; it was a pneumatocracy, response to Spirit” (Sohm [1923] 1970; Smith 1998, p. 43). Compare this with the contrasting outlook of medieval Christian jurists (Smith 1988), in which it was generally agreed that God spoke through the people: Vox populi, vox dei. The gift of authority was said to pass from God to the prince via the public. Whether revocably granted or irrevocably alienated, authority was said to pass through human hands. In the true ecclesia, says Sohm, Revelation replaces election (Smith 1998, p. 44). For him, as for Paul, the truly pious “recognition” of charisma is simply “willing submission” (Harnack 1910, p. 196; Smith 1998, p. 46).

This is the point at which Max Weber enters the scene. Where Sohm has posited grace “bestowed” by the Holy Spirit, Weber has seen “sacred psychic states” that were produced by the faithful. In the apostolic age, the spirit did not come upon the solitary individual, but upon the assembly. Speaking in tongues and other gifts of the spirit as prophecy emerged in the midst of the community and obviously resulted from mass influence. The very community was especially productive of these sacred psychic states (Weber [1917–1919] 1952, p. 292).

For Weber, the charisma of the Pauline ecclesia was novel in its specific features, but far from sociologically unique in principle. Similar phenomena had been found before in many spheres and eras. Indeed, Weber stresses that the category of charisma in the West is applicable to the entire Judeo–Christian tradition—including Catholic, as well as apostolic, Christianity (Smith 1998, p. 50). In the Prose Life of Cuthbert of Durham, the saint’s charisma of healing is represented when a monk heals the eye of a youth by touching it with hairs from Cuthbert’s head (Figure 13).

For Sohm, the depersonalization of charisma is “impossible”, a mystical subversion of the truth effective only at the level of sacrilegious myth and ritual. For Weber, the “depersonalization” of charisma is no more mystical than its association with an individual. He sees that charisma is a social force. To explain the “divine right of kings” (Figgis [1896] 1922; Nederman 2018) in this light, Weber refers not to the real traits of kings, but to the “sociologically important phenomenon of clan charisma”. Entire dynasties are imagined to possess divine qualities that qualify them for rule. Akin to this, he says, is “the legend of the ‘blue blood’ of a nobility, [which,] whatever its specific origins, belongs to the same sociological type” (Weber [1916] 1964, p. 49).

All of the above means, in reality, that we are, for the moment, faced with different critical positions regarding the notion of charisma. St. Paul: a Hellenistic Pharisee converted to Christianity who uses the Jewish concept of charisma as a divine gift, already found in Philo of Alexandria. Rudolf Sohm: the theologian, professor of canon law and Germanic law who takes up St. Paul’s theology of grace in the context of Protestant historicism applied to biblical studies, and whose main concept is “charismatic organization”. Max Weber: sharing Sohm’s reverence for authority, his sociologically derived concept of charisma is predominantly political: “[A] certain quality of an individual personality, by virtue of which he is set apart from ordinary men and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities” (Weber [1922] 1947). While Rudolf Sohm assumes the Pauline theology of grace and the idea of charisma as a gift, for Weber, it is “a certain quality of an individual’s personality”. These are the two formally accepted ways of defining charisma: as “grace” (theologically) and as “influence” (sociologically).

4.3. Charisma as Imago

Kantorowicz’s critical position may contribute something to the state of the question. We can learn from Synthronos that a third way of understanding charisma is via imago or representation. This is how EKa quotes Fritz Taeger as a meaningful reference on charisma (Figure 14). Paul would mean “inspiration”. Weber would use “domination”. And EKa suggests “visualization” (Jaeger 2012, pp. 4, 17, 407). Charisma, especially in the Middle Ages, is the personal energy of the leader that moves alterity through visuality. When developing this scheme further, we soon realize that grace is unavoidable, domination is unbearable, and image is irresistible.

If this triad is acceptable, then some well-known ideas on charisma can prove even more helpful than hitherto: Fritz Taeger’s notion of “divinization through representation”, “divinization in representation,”(Przywara 1960, p. 564) or an immediate connection (of the leader) with divinity, with the miracle considered as an external proof of the charisma (Taeger 1957–1960, I: 439); Clifford Geertz’s idea of the leader (although partly borrowed from Weber and Shils) is to be the “active center of the social order” (Geertz 1983, p. 122; Shils 1965); and similarly, Edward Shils’ notion about “dispersion and concentration of charisma”, (Shils 1958) and “center and periphery” (Shils 1975); and ultimately Stephen Jaeger’s idea of the “common features of ‘enchantment’ through charismatic effects shared across a variety of forms of representation” (Jaeger 2012, pp. 3, 26–47).

If we see charisma as linked to aesthetic representation and isolated from theology and sociology, we can better understand Taeger (the power of representation to divinize the leader), Geertz (the meaning of the social center as in some way theatrical for the king), and Shils (the conquest of the center by performative means). In this way, St. Paul’s charisma as “gift from God” and Weber’s as “dominion” may be complemented by Kantorowicz’s as representation, portrayal, and simulacrum.

All this must include Jaeger’s use of the notion of sublimity as an “astonishment [that] overwhelms the narrow rationalism” (Jaeger 2006, p. 7), enchantment as an effect of charisma, “engaging the whole range of meaning of that word from a shallow moment of pleasure […] to a spellbound state of participation and imitation, to idolatry and transformation”, and ultimately considering “personal charisma, whether natural or cultivated, or a mixture of both in whatever degree, [as being] itself a form of representation and its bearer a kind of living work of art” (Jaeger 2012, p. 12).

5. Charisma as Visual Rhetoric in Action

If we can indeed conceptualize the notion of charisma through 1. the Pauline way of the theology of grace, 2. the Weberian idea of domination, and 3. the way of representation proposed by EKa, we are then faced with a new theoretical scenario. It thus seems that the conceptual exploration of the third way of charisma leads us into a quite familiar, though unexpected, territory, as it is the fundamental basis of Aristotle’s Rhetoric, which in the Middle Ages was taken up by St. Thomas Aquinas in the Summa Theologica (Aquinas 2014, II–II, q. 177, a. 1c.). It could not be otherwise: the definition of medieval charisma must go through some concept related to personal communication or, in short, a certain kind of rhetoric.

But this, rather than a drawback, may be a great argumentative advantage which, moreover, fits in with tradition: for the apparent discontinuity between the notion of charisma in St. Paul and that of Max Weber does not seem logical. There must be something in between—and we have seen this in Synthronos and other works by Kantorowicz on medieval political theology—that allows charisma to be defined without discontinuity between tradition and the present. In other words, the gap between theology and sociology is not only possible to bridge, but furthermore, essential to overcome.

The concept of charisma that EKa uses has the great advantage of being one of the consequences of his own reflection on medieval political theology, with one foot in Antiquity and the other in Modernity. He is aware of the importance of the invisibility of charisma understood in Pauline theology in the sense of unmerited grace to work miracles, prophesy, and speak in tongues.

This idea of charisma in primitive Christianity requires the invisibility or hidden presence of the gift typical of a stoic idea of the human, in which what is important is precisely faith in the things that are hoped for. In his Letter to Hebrews, St. Paul writes that “faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (Hb 11,1). The Clementine Latin Vulgate uses the expression argumentum non apparentium, which points directly to this invisibility of the charisma of faith, the substance of things that we do not see. “Through faith”, Paul continues, “we understand that the worlds were framed by the Word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear”. The expression ut ex invisibilibus visibilia fierent (Hb 11.3) underlines the invisible condition of charisma.

When we move into the modern idea of charisma, we understand the priority of relationship instead of invisibility. “It has become a conventional truism to declare that for Weber, ‘the charismatic process is […] the natural development of the vertical relationship between charismatic leader and followers’” (Cavalli 1987, p. 318, quoted in Kalyvas 2002, p. 68). In its purely sociological modern form, “the concept [of charisma] itself remains firmly embedded in the quasi-mystical relationship between the call of a leader and the responses of suggestible followers” (Blom Hansen and Verkaaik 2009, p. 7). In the meantime, can we trust visibility in the modern world, where mechanization, repeatability, and lack of originality introduce us to a world of uncertainty? The modern idea of charisma, in other words, seems to be a kind of laboratory of sociality where dominion and disenchantment occupy the very center of socio-political power.

In contrast to St. Paul and Weber, EKa’s notion of charisma has the energy of representation as a bridge between a Pauline pneumatology of grace and a Weberian sociology of power. Following Kahn (2009), representation in TKTB describes a relationship between political theology and fiction. Fiction means, first of all, the notion of a legal fiction, which is central to Kantorowicz’s analysis of the notion of the king’s two bodies. But it also means literature, in an anachronistic sense, when applied to medieval and Renaissance texts, and the arts (as is the case with Synthronos).

In TKTB, we read an analysis of both Shakespeare’s Richard II and Dante’s Divine Comedy. While Shakespeare depicts the fatal separation of the king’s two bodies and, thus, anticipates the regicide of Charles I and the English republic, the Divine Comedy articulates Dante’s secular religion of humanity and his vision of a world community. There are, thus, two arguments, narratives, or representations: the first concerns the Christological origin of secular constitutionalism in Shakespeare’s England; the second concerns the secular religion of humanity best articulated by Dante (Schiller 1990).

This means that TKTB advocated a historiography that dealt with myth rather than fact, perceptions rather than positivist ideas of knowledge. It thus provided a methodological model in its attention to symbolic forms and the pride of place it gave to literature. TKTB was influential not only because of the centrality it afforded to myth, literature, and representation, but also because it was essentially about the power of metaphor (Kahn 2009, p. 96), and this might be a middle way between the Pauline and the Weberian ideas of charisma. The metaphors used in the environment of medieval and early modern power (such as liturgies, iconographies, poems, tales, oils for royal anointment, thrones, swords, cloaks, etc.) are meant to bridge and unite the notions of charisma as a gift from heaven and charisma as a social structure. If this charisma as representation is commonly displayed through perspectus, corpus, and persona, we have to face a visual understanding of rhetoric.

5.1. Aristotle’s Rhetoric

We must first grasp the nature of Aristotle’s Rhetoric in order to appreciate its reception by a medieval audience accustomed to the Ciceronian tradition of rhetorical handbooks (Cope 1867). In Aristotle’s account, rhetoric is a techne or tool for evaluating discourses. Rhetoric is “the ability, in each particular case, to see the available means of persuasion”, no matter what the subject is (1355b25) (Copeland 2014, p. 97). There are three kinds of proof: from the character of the speaker (ethos), from the emotions aroused in an audience (pathos), and from argumentation itself (logos) (1356a1). Book 2 of the Rhetoric represents a comprehensive exploration of pathos, or what arouses emotions in the audience (Siss 1910; Braet 1992).

Kantorowicz approaches the problem of communicating charisma, or the rhetoric of charisma, using a fragment of Henry Bracton’s De legibus et consuetudinibus Angliæ (The Laws and Customs of England), composed before 1235 and considered the basis for legal literature under Edward I of England (Figure 15). He says that “Bracton’s comparison of the king with the humbled Christ before the Roman judge may lead us to yet another problem of Bracton’s concept of kingship, a problem of political ‘Christology’. He writes: ‘For that end has he been created and elected a king that he may give justice to all, and that in him the Lord be seated (Ps. 9.5 and also 88.15) and that through him the Lord discerns his judgement (III Kings 3.11).’”31

This phrase “The Lord be seated” (Dominus sedeat) is a keystone to understanding in what sense Synthronos can deliver a middle way definition of charisma, between St. Paul and Weber, through the notion of a visual rhetoric of Aristotelian matrix. Aristotle gives a detailed typology of emotions relevant for persuading an audience: anger and satisfaction, or calmness; friendship and enmity; fear and confidence; shame and shamelessness; favor (or kindliness) and its opposite, ingratitude (or unkindliness); pity and indignation; and envy and emulation. He does not say that these are the feelings to be inspired by the sole aesthetic representation of the leader. Aristotle allows the possibility of thinking rather that pathos may have priority over logos and ethos (Aristotle 1991) as well as, by analogy, the Synthronos may suggest a similar idea with its strong, visual and textual, metaphor of throne–sharing.

5.2. “The Quinity of Winchester”

Synthronos was a further development of Kantorowicz’s text on the “five persons” of the Trinity, which had been a way to approach the Middle Ages with the concept of charisma derived from throne–sharing iconography (Kantorowicz 1947),32 really a gesture of visual rhetoric. For him, in the medieval period, “The sharing of one bench-throne is found more frequently than the enthronement on two different seats. The two seats are equal in the Stuttgart Psalter” (Kantorowicz 1947, pp. 76–77). But other evidence on charisma as representation of the sharing-throne was displayed as the representation of Psalm 109 in the Psalter (Figure 16).

Theorizing charisma allows us to point at visual narrative and pose questions about pictorial storytelling that narrative scholars since the time of Aristotle have asked: What is a pictorial story? Why do we need pictorial stories? Why do we need the “same” pictorial stories over and over? And finally, why is our need for more pictorial stories never satisfied (Miller 1990, p. 68)? Do they, in the end, give a narrative form to a logically insoluble problem, such as charisma (Smith et al. 2004, p. 346)? This is why the symbolic narrative of Synthronos, inspired in notions of medieval political theology, is so important to us. This is probably Clifford Geertz’s reason for writing that “Erst Kantorowicz’s extraordinary The King’s Two Bodies—that magisterial discussion of, as we put it, ‘medieval political theology’—traced the vicissitudes of royal charisma in the West over two hundred years and a half–dozen countries” (Geertz 1983, p. 123).

In this context, the important thing is to note the three dimensions of charisma mentioned above: logics, ethics, and aesthetics—in other words, the importance of rhetoric for charisma. Logics (Pauline) means that the king will judge with the words of God. Ethics (Weberian) arises when the leader establishes order in the hierarchy of action. Aesthetics and visual rhetoric happen when the body of the king represents the body politic.

5.3. Wagnerian vs. Dantean Approach

By this point in my text, the reader is already aware of the hypotheses suggested. However, they may be somewhat dissatisfied that a crucial aspect to understand is still hanging in the air. I refer to the sharp hermeneutical difference between Kantorowicz and Max Weber. In this respect, it seems that we can leave St. Paul’s view aside and devote the last part of this text to a critical analysis of their respective positions in terms that some literature has already suggested: the complementary view that it is possible to analyze between a Wagnerian concept of charisma and a Dantean approach.

On the Italianate, civilizing, or Dantean Emperor Frederick, Ralph Giesey writes: “The German world was made more civilized by the infusion of Mediterranean culture through Frederick II, who was born, raised and lived most of his life in Italy. Kantorowicz presented the character of Frederick II not in Wagnerian but in Dantean terms” (Giesey 1985, p. 193). Landauer adds that the language that Frederick II elevated in his court was not German, but Italian. In essence, Frederick was Dante’s predecessor, rather than Goethe’s (Boureau 1990, pp. 23, 25; Cf. Landauer 1994).

This distinction is of great help for two reasons. We have first to understand the uniqueness of the notion of medieval charisma in EKa, based on representation, the power of pathos, and, ultimately, the visual rhetoric of the leader. In the example of Synthronos, this notion relies on the throne as a charismatic object. Second, to appreciate that, on the other hand, Weber’s definition of charisma is clearer and more explicit than EKa’s, with the drawback of being socio–Marxist in root and of having an uncertain scientific foundation. In reality, EKa’s proposal is based on the more solid Burckhardt–derived Kulturwischenschaft.33 If we finally succeed in clarifying these two hermeneutical options, one “Teutonic” and the other “Roman”, the middle way between St. Paul and Weber, which Kantorowicz traverses, will have been explained. The key point is to consider the very different intellectual affiliations of EKa and Weber.

5.4. Weber vs. Kantorowicz

EKa is wary of being “Teutonic” in the sense of choosing Frederick II as a topic for his doctoral dissertation and its further development. The book was admired by Hermann Göring and other prominent personalities of the Nazi regime. Göring’s high estimation of Kaiser Friedrich is evidenced by his sending a copy of it to Mussolini, as Kantorowicz himself remarked in a letter of 1963 (Kantorowicz 1963; Ruehl 2000, p. 188). According to the same letter, another copy “was on Himmler’s night table” and “Hitler himself apparently read it twice” (Picker 1963, p. 69). But “Frederick II stands forth in Kantorowicz’s work not as the Teutonic hero but as a Roman Emperor” (Giesey 1965, p. 34; Ruehl 2015).

A swastika was certainly used for the collection in which EKa published his book, edited by Georg Bondi in the cultural context of the Blaetter fuer die Kunst (Figure 17a). It is true that “Since this series of the Bondi publishing firm was devoted to the George–Kreis (Figure 17b), Kantorowicz was attached to someone who had a special place in early twentieth German culture” (Giesey 1965, pp. 5–6; Yarrow 1983), although George built up Ernst’s confidence, excited his imagination and made him work.”34 With his first book, EKa had characterized the Staufen Emperor in terms of a heroic personality in history, in very Nietzschean terms. He was influenced by Nietzsche as one of the formative forces on George–Kreis thought (Raschel 1984; Landauer 1994, p. 4). In fact, the last chapter of TKTB invokes Nietzsche in its very first sentence, and once Nietzsche’s name is invoked, the spirit of irony reigns. The sacred king has become Antichrist (Kantorowicz 1957, p. 292).

But this influence was very different from the positivism that would impregnate Max Weber’s structuralist notion of charisma. EKa worked in the tradition of German Geistesgeschichte, “spiritual” (cultural and intellectual) history, drawing upon the long tradition of Hegelian idealism in German humanistic circles. He foregrounded past ideas, theory, the literary and visual arts, making them spiritual and intellectual refinements, rather than the material and social forces that were Weber’s central concern.

6. Conclusions

We have reached the end of a long, expressive, and difficult text. Throughout its chapters and sections, the reader may have had the sensation of being lost in a sea of themes, references, and comparisons. It is true that it does not have a linear structure from beginning to end. It rather resembles a labyrinth, in which there is from the beginning a fundamental intention that is difficult to realize, and, through an apparently tortuous path, the necessary lights appear that project solutions to the problems posed and new problems that will later be illuminated. From this point of view, a first conclusion refers to the method used. Rather than proposing an architectural construction of the text, I have tried to offer an organized magma with bright lights and dark shadows that should finally configure a general image understandable to all.

In the first part, the analysis of the concept of synthronos in Kantorowicz’s work is something new. The fact that the gods share a throne with men is a difficult topic from the point of view of medieval political theology, with its ancient roots and modern consequences. The idea of sharing a throne with the gods complicates the two–body theory of the king because it increases the casuistry in the analysis of charisma understood as a unitary visual representation of how the physical body and the political body of the king are intertwined. In this sense, in addition to exposing the content of Synthronos, I have sought to offer a critical reading of this manuscript until very recently unknown to criticism. This analysis allows us to make the distinction that neither in the tradition of Israel nor in that of Hellenistic kingship has the element of time been effective in affirming throne–sharing with a god.

Jewish apocalyptic ideas of throne–sharing were primarily messianic and beyond time, whereas Hellenistic ideas were primarily individual and mythical, and timeless. However, the New Testament applications of Psalm 109 depart from both the Israelite and Hellenistic traditions insofar as the throne shared by the Messiah, Son of man, with God the Father is tied to a specific moment in the life of Jesus and in the history of the human race. The seating of the man Jesus at the right hand of God the Father appears as an ultimate goal, as the last consequence of a tragedy, the last scene of a terrifying drama that began on earth with the incarnation and ended with the crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension into heaven. The subsequent synthronismos, therefore, would appear as the last station of a long journey.

This first critical analysis of Kantorowicz’s text allowed us to lay the methodological and historiographical foundations of the great confrontation that I have proposed in this text: the Pauline notion of charisma as a free gift of God that makes it possible to work wonders, versus the idea of charisma in Max Weber as leadership based on the dominion of the leader over the social structure, and charisma understood in Kantorowicz as a political force emanating from a powerful image of the leader.

Through the tripartite explanation of representation, it can be understood that the charisma born from the projection of the leader’s image is not a marketing mechanism in the sense of inducing the customer to buy with a visual product, but a visual display that constitutes an ontological influence on the viewer. The basis of the effectiveness of this concept is to understand that the king’s two–body theory needs to have an effective fiction, a compelling narrative—or, to use Aristotelian language, a transformative visual rhetoric.

At no point in his work does Ernst Kantorowicz make any special reference either to the word of charisma or to the work of Max Weber, whom he had met in Munich at the Faculty of Economics. He had the opportunity to attend Weber’s 1919 lecture series, when the famous economist and sociologist was dealing with the topic of charismatic power, which would subsequently feature in Economy and society, a work that came out posthumously. With his influential use of the word charisma, Max Weber had kidnapped the term from the year 1922. It had to be very difficult for Kantorowicz to use the term charisma in a different sense than Weber. His choice is to avoid the Weberian sociologist way of using it and to keep exploring his own concept with other words, such as numen (learned from Taeger as well lines 648, 650), or others, such as, isotheos, synnaos, synthronos, consessor, theoprepes, or deuteroi.

Thus, it is concluded that the notion of representation derived from the Synthronos manuscript, supported by The King’s Two Bodies, The Quinity of Winchester, and other important EKa texts, has three dimensions: it refers to perspective (perspectus) as a two-dimensional fiction of a three-dimensional reality, to the body (corpus) as a tangible symbol of charisma, and to the person (persona) as a performative interface in which charisma expresses itself and modifies reality. These three dimensions of representation do not cease to be symbolic, theatrical, or tragic. However, there is such a unity between their signifier and signified that they inevitably refer to a dimension not only representative of the energy of charisma, but also ontological—that is, with the real power to change reality and restructure it theologically and politically.

Evidently, the notion of charisma based on representation does not imply a break or solution of continuity between St. Paul’s theology of the gratuitous gift and Max Weber’s sociology of disenchantment. It is a matter of establishing—and, in part, reconstructing—a methodological bridge between two options artificially opposed by the historiography on charisma. What has happened with the concept of charisma is what has happened, for example, with the historiography of architecture: just as the role of cathedrals in the universal history of architecture has been ignored, so has the notion of charisma supported by a medieval political theology.

The continuity between Greco–Roman architecture and Renaissance remains, and the importance of the symbolic–theological space of cathedrals is forgotten. In the same way, the Pauline notion of charism, based on a Stoic–Christian (and rhetorical–Roman) theology of the gift, and its continuity in the modern sociology of charism based on a structuralism with dialectical–Marxist roots, is admitted. But charisma understood as the irresistible force of the leader’s image has remained on the margins of current historiography.

The primary sources are what they are: Kantorowicz’s manuscript and its various sources, the New Testament and its contexts, the scientific fragility and the seductive word of Max Weber with its conditioning factors. Many images, some published in our text, endorse the symbolic and theological potential of the Middle Ages. But from the ontological point of view, the lesson of the medieval period is the same as always: let the representation speak so that the word is even more credible.

In fact, this work also leads to conclusions that, being the most relevant, may have been hidden in the thickness of a long text full of references and illustrations. But to the reader accustomed to the optical effects of research, they will not have gone unnoticed. First, Kantorowicz avoids the use of the word charisma in order to be safe from the sociological, rhetorical, and unscientific magnetism of Max Weber. At the same time, our text has tried to show that Eka is more interested in the concept of charisma as an embodied representation of his medieval theology than in the word charisma in its Pauline or Weberian literalism. In fact, not only Synthronos, but almost all of Eka’s work develops the concept of charisma understood as the political magnetism that, whoever holds power, displays through its visual representation. Second, the notion of charisma, especially in the Middle Ages, belongs to the sphere of political theology, insofar as it is a hinge-concept that allows the mutual transfer between sacredness and secularity that occurs in the visible person of the leader. Third, it is possible to move beyond a hitherto forced Pauline–Weberian bipolarity in the established definitions of the concept of charisma.

What was missing, at least, was an inevitable and intrinsic third way to the “free gift” and the Weberian “simply sociological power”. The explication of a non-linguistic or visual rhetoric was necessary, so that charisma could be not just a phrase or a word, but an iconic silence that everyone understands and can consequently submit to so that, finally, the Middle Ages can be truly mystical and functionally political.