is, on the twofold way in which the second cause carries out its action in the
government of the world, at one time according to its nature (this is the model
of the ordo ad invicem), and at another time according to its participation in the first cause ( ordo ad deum). The action of the second cause is thus compared with
a heated knife that, according to its nature, cuts, but according to its participa-
tion in fire, burns (“sicut cultellus ignitus, secundum propria formam incidit, in
quantum vero est ignitus urit”). Once again, the Aristotelian aporia concerning
the transcendent good is solved by means of the articulation between transcen-
dence and immanence:
Thus, each of the highest intelligences that is called “divine” has a double action:
one insofar as it abundantly participates in the divine goodness, and another
according to its proper nature. (Ibid., p. 132)
But this also means, following the division between what is general and what is
particular according to which providential action is articulated, that the govern-
ment of the world redoubles itself into a regimen Dei or causae primae, which is extended to all created things, and a regimen intelligentiae or causae secundae, which concerns only some of them:
And so it is that the government of the first cause, which is according to the
essence of goodness, extends to all things [ . . . ] But the rule of an intelligence,
which is proper to it, does not extend to all things. (Ibid., p. 133)
If we now turn to the treatise De gubernatione mundi ( Summa Theologiae, I, qq. 103–113), we see that it is precisely the hierarchical connection of first and
second causes that provides us with a model of the articulation between general
and special providence through which the divine government of the world is
carried out.
God governs the world as a first cause (“ad modum primi agentis”: ibid., 1,
q. 105, a. 5, ad 1), bestowing on created things their form and proper nature, and
preserving them in being. But this does not prevent his operation from entailing
also the operation of the second causes (“nihil prohibet quin una et eadem actio
procedat a primo et secundo agente”: ibid., 1, q. 105, a. 5, ad 2). The govern-
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ment of the world thus results from the articulation of a hierarchy of causes and
orders, of the Kingdom and particular governments:
From every cause there results some sort of order in its effects, since a cause has the
meaning of being a principle. In consequence there are as many orders as there are
causes, with one order contained under another, even as one cause is subordinated
to another in such a way that the higher cause is not subject to the lower, but the
other way round. There is a clear example in human affairs: the domestic order
[ ordo domus] depends on the father of the family; that order in turn is subordi-
nated to the municipal order [ sub ordine civitatis] deriving from the city’s ruler; the municipal order comes under the regimen of the king, who is the source of
order in the whole realm. (Ibid., 1, q. 105, a. 6)
Insofar as it is considered in its connection with the first cause, the order of the
world is unchangeable and coincides with divine prescience and goodness. On
the other hand, insofar as it entails an articulation of second causes, it makes
room for a divine intervention “praeter ordinem rerum.”
The Liber de causis is so important for medieval theology because by dis-
tinguishing first causes from second causes it discovered the articulation between
transcendence and immanence, general and particular, upon which the machine
of the divine government of the world could be founded.
4.12. The discussions that led to the canonists’ elaboration of the “political
type” of the rex inutilis between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries is the place in which the distinction between the Kingdom and the Government finds for
the first time its technical formulation in the juridical field. What lies at the
basis of these discussions was the doctrine of the pontiff’s power to depose the
temporal sovereign, which had been formulated in a letter from Gregory VII
to Hermann of Metz. Gregory refers here to Pope Zachary’s deposition for in-
adequacy of the last Merovingian king, Childeric III, and his replacement with
Pippin, Charles the Great’s father. This text is important, since it was included
by Gratian in his Decretum and thus served as a reference for the elaborations
of later canonists. Asserting the primacy of the sacerdotium over the imperium, Gregory writes, “another Roman pontiff deposed a king of the Franks, not so
much because of his evil deeds as because he was not equal to so great an office
[ tantae potestati non erat utilis], and set in his place Pippin, father of Charles the Great, releasing all the Franks from the oath of fealty which they had sworn
to (the king)” ( Decretum, c. 15, q. 6, c. 3; see Peters, p. 281). The chroniclers
of the twelfth century had already turned Childeric into the prototype of the
rex ignavus et inutilis, who embodies the gap between nominal regality and its
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459
real exercise (“Stabat enim in rege sola nominis umbra; in Pippino vero potes
tas et dignitas efficaciter apparebat. Erat tunc Hildericus rex ignavus et inutilis
[ . . . ]”: Geoffrey of Viterbo, Pantheon, in PL, 198, 924d–925a). But it was thanks to the canonists, especially Hugh of Pisa, that the rex inutilis was turned into the paradigm of the distinction between dignitas and administratio, the office and the activity in which it expresses itself. According to this doctrine, the illness,
old age, madness, or sloth of a prince or prelate should not necessarily lead to
his deposition, but rather to the separation between the dignitas, which remains
attached to his person, and the practice, which is entrusted to a coadiutor or
curator. The fact that what was at stake was not only something practical but
also involved an actual doctrine of the separability of sovereign power is proved
by the precision with which the Glossa ordinaria to the passage of the Decretum that reported the case of two Roman emperors who reigned simultaneously assigns the dignitas to one, and the administratio to the other, thus ratifying at one and the same time the unity and divisibility of power (“Dic quod erant duae
personae, sed tamen erant loco unius [ . . . ] Sed forte unus habuit dignitatem,
alter administrationem”: quoted in Peters, p. 295).
It is on the basis of these canonistic elaborations that, in 1245, at the demand
of the Portuguese clergy and nobility, Innocent IV issued the decretal Grandi,
with which he assigned to Afonso of Boulogne, brother of King Sancho II—who
had been shown to be unable to govern—the cura et administratio generalis et
libera of the kingdom, yet leaving the regal dignitas to the sovereign.
In other words, the radical case of the rex inutilis lays bare the twofold struc-
ture that defines the governmental machine of the West. Sovereign power is
structurally articulated according to two different levels, aspects, or polarities:
it is, at the same time, dignitas and administratio, Kingdom and Government.
The sovereign is structurally mehaignié, in the sense that his dignity is measured against the possibility of its uselessness and inefficacy, in a correlation in which
the rex inutilis legitimates the actual administration that he has always already cut off from himself and that, however, formally continues to belong to him.
Thus, the answer to Von Seydel’s question “what is left of reigning if we
take governing away from it?” is that the Kingdom is the remainder that poses
itself as the whole that infinitely subtracts itself from itself. Just as, in the divine
gubernatio of the world, transcendence and immanence, ordo ad deum and ordo ad invicem, must be unceasingly distinguished for providential action to unceasingly rejoin them, so the Kingdom and the Government constitute a double
machine, which is the place of a continuous separation and articulation. The
potestas is plena only to the extent that it can be divided.
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א Not without noticeable hesitations, medieval jurists developed the distinction
between merum imperium and mistum imperium. Following one of Irnerius’s glosses, they called imperium that without which there cannot be a jurisdiction ( sine quo nulla esset iurisdictio), but then distinguished as “pure” the imperium considered as such and, on the other hand, called “mixed” the imperium that involves an actual iurisdictio (Costa, pp. 112– 113). In Stephen of Tournai’s Summa this distinction is developed into the idea of a clear separation between iurisdictio and administratio, between a potestas and its practice:
If the emperor grants somebody the jurisdiction and the power to judge [ potestas
iudicandi], but does not allot him a province or a people to be judged, he will
then have the title, that is the name, but not the practice [ habet quidem titulum,
idest nomen, sed non administrationem]. (Stefan von Doornick, p. 222)
4.13. An analysis of the canonistic notion of plenitudo potestatis can give
rise to some instructive considerations. According to the theory of the pri-
macy of the pontiff ’s spiritual power over the temporal power of the sovereign,
which found in Boniface VIII’s bull Unam sanctam its polemical expression and
in Giles of Rome’s De ecclesiastica potestate its doctrinal layout, the plenitude of power lies with the Supreme Pontiff, to whom belong both of the swords
discussed in Luke 22:38 (“Domine, ecce duo gladii hic. At ille dixit eis: Satis
est”), interpreted as the symbols of spiritual and material power. The debate
about the primacy of one power over the other was so fierce, and the struggles
between the partisans of the empire and those of ecclesiastic power so violent
and persistent, that historians and scholars ended up overlooking what should
have been a preliminary question: Why is power originally divided? Why does
it present itself as always already articulated into two swords? As a matter of
fact, even the supporters of the pontifical plenitudo potestatis admit that power is structurally divided and that the government of men ( gubernacio hominum is
the technical term that Giles uses recurrently) is necessarily articulated into two
(and only two) authorities [ potestà] or swords:
In the government of men and in the rule of the human race or in the rule of the
faithful, there are only two powers and two swords [ due potestates et duo gladii ]: the priestly and the royal or imperial power—that is, a spiritual and a material
sword. (Giles of Rome, On Ecclesiastical Power, p. 108)
In his treatise, Giles cannot help asking the question as to “why there are two
swords in the Church and neither more nor fewer” (ibid., p. 107). If the spir-
itual power is higher than any other and naturally extends its government
to material things just as the soul governs the body, “what need was there,
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461
then, to institute another power and another sword [ aliam potestatem et alium
gladium]?” (ibid., p. 108). The co-substantiality and co-originarity of the split
between the two powers in the Church is proved by Giles’s interpretation of
Luke 22:38.
And if due consideration be given to the words of the Gospel, the way in which
the Church possesses both swords is perfectly illustrated by the two swords [there
mentioned]. For, as Bede says, one of those swords was drawn and the other re-
mained in its sheath. And so, although there were two swords, we read that only
one sword was drawn, with which Peter struck the servant of the High Priest and
cut off his right ear. What, therefore, does this mean— that while there were two
swords, the one was drawn and the other remained in its sheath—if not that the
Church possesses two swords: the spiritual as user [ quantum ad usum], which is
represented by the drawn sword, and the material, not as user, but as commander
[ quantum ad nutum]. (Ibid., pp. 51–52)
In addition, the two swords,
exist now, under the Law of Grace; they existed under the Written Law; and they
existed under the law of nature [ . . . ] These two swords, then, always were and
are different things. (Ibid., pp. 20–21)
If the division of power is structural to such an extent, what is the reason for
this? The large number of answers given by Giles is a function of their often
evident insufficiency, and it is possible that the decisive answer is to be read, as
it were, between the lines of those adduced. An initial reason for the duality lies
in the “great excellence and the very great perfection [ nimia excellencia et nimia
perfectio] of spiritual things” (ibid., p. 108). Spiritual things are, in fact, so noble that, in order to avoid the possibility of deficiencies and negligences with regard
to them, it was necessary to establish a second power, which specifically takes
care of corporeal things, so that the spiritual power may be entirely devoted to
spiritual things. But the reason for their distinction is, at the same time, the
foundation of their strict articulation:
But, as has been noted, when the two powers are such that the one is general and
extended [ generalis et extensa] and the other particular and limited [ particularis et contracta], it must be that the one is under the other, is instituted through the other, and may act only by commission of the other. (Ibid., p. 109)
Giles compares the relation between the two with the connection that, accord-
ing to the medieval doctrine of generation, exists between celestial virtue (as a
first cause) and the seed that is in the animal when it mates (as a second cause).
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“There would be no power in the seed of a horse to produce a horse unless it
had this from the power of heaven” (ibid.). But it is precisely here that that the
aporetic character of the relation between the two powers comes to light. The
two swords are clearly divided, and yet, the second, the material one, is included
in the first. The plenitudo potestatis that rests with the pontiff is, in fact, defined by Giles as “that fullness of power [that] resides in some agent when that agent
can do without a secondary cause whatever it can do with a secondary cause”
(ibid., p. 187). For this reason, that is, insofar as the pontiff has a power in
which every power is contained (“posse in quo reservatur omne posse”: ibid.),
his potestas is said to be full.
And, so that we may pass to the government of men by way of those natural
phenomena which we see in the government of the world, we shall say that
fullness of power does not reside in
the heaven or in any secondary agent what-
soever; for the heaven cannot do without a secondary cause what it can do with
a secondary cause. For example, although the heaven and a lion bring about the
generation of a lion, the heaven could not produce a lion without a lion, nor
could it produce a horse without a horse. (Ibid., pp. 187–188)
On the other hand, the spiritual power can produce its effect without the aid
of second causes, and yet, it needs to separate itself from the material sword.
There is something lacking in spiritual power, in spite of its perfection, and
that something is the effectiveness of the execution. Turning to the doctrine
of the distinction between the titularity of an office and its execution, Giles
argues that
by reason of her power and lordship, the Church as such has a superior and
primary lordship in temporal things, but she does not have an immediate juris-
diction and [right of ] execution [ . . . ] Caesar and the temporal lord, however,
do have such a jurisdiction and [right of ] execution; and so we see that there are
distinct powers, we see that there are distinct rights, we see that there are distinct
swords. But this distinction does not mean that the one power is not under the
other, the one right under the other, and the one sword under the other. (Ibid.,
pp. 199–200)
The actual reason for the distinction between primary and secondary power,
titularity and execution, is that it is a necessary condition for the proper func-
tioning of the governmental machine:
But if there were only one sword in the Church, namely the spiritual, then those
tasks which must be performed in the government of men would not be as well
done; for the spiritual sword would then neglect many tasks which should be
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463
performed in the spiritual sphere, because it would itself be obliged to attend to
material affairs [ . . . ] Therefore, the fact that a second sword was instituted is
not due to a lack of power on the part of the spiritual: rather, it is for the sake
of good order and decency [ ex bona ordinacione et ex decencia] [ . . . ] It is not due to a lack of power on the part of the spiritual sword that a second sword,
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