Political and Sacramental Theology

There is a continuity between sacramental and political theology in the medieval world. Alternatively, we might go so far as to say that political theology is a subset of sacramental theology. As Timothy Rosendale says in a magnificent recent article (in Shakespeare and the Culture of Christianity), for medieval kings (he is speaking of Shakespeare’s Richard II in particular), . . .

“signs are directly equivalent to their referents: the crown is kingly authority; his name is a standing army. There is no sense of slippage or potential dissociation between signifier and signified (in this respect, of course, the poet-King is a rather poor poet indeed, perhaps even an antipoet). And in this respect, this hermeneutic is strikingly reminiscent of medieval Catholic theology, in which the sacramental elements were dogmatically not signs that pointed to some external referent, but precisely were that referent.”

A political philosophy formed on this medieval theology “hinges on a similarly irrefragable and unproblematic identity of person, authority, and office: for him, kingship is not conditional, but immutable and divinely ordained, and his authority as king is absolute (and absolutely contained in his person).” What gives the king his kingship is the “balm” of the royal anointing, which cannot be washed away with “all the water in the rough rude sea” (Richard II 3.2.54-55).

The post-reformation period broke that unity, and shattered the Catholic ritualization and ceremony that provided the ordering of medieval life. In particular what the Reformation brings is a disruption of this identity of sign and thing; the bread is not the body of Christ, but a sign; the wine is not transformed into the blood of Jesus, but is a sign of that blood. Once this identity of sacramental sign and thing is shattered, what is the basis for political authority?

Rosendale argues that this is the question posed in Shakespeare’s Lancastrian tetrology – Richard II through Henry V. In part, this tetrology traces the movement from a sacral kingship to pragmatic kingship – what counts for Henry IV cannot be the royal anointing, which he does not possess, but his superior competence as king. In part too, the tetrology traces the movement from sacral kingship to “vile politics,” a kind of cynical Machiavellian pragmatics. This is certainly the destination of Shakespeare’s other tetrology, which culimates in the perfect Shakespearean Machiavel, Richard III.

But Henry V offers an alternative, one that is as theologically rooted as the medieval system. To be sure, Henry’s own exploits justify his kingship: “though these exploits are often manipulative, self-serving and morally questionable, this play concentrates on unification and heroic success, produced in large part by Henry’s potently constructive combination of successive legitimacy and pragmatic ability – the latter largely constituted by his long apprenticeship to signification and representation in the intervening Henry IV plays.”

One sign of the efficacy of Henry’s work is the union of the various nationalities of Britain: “In Richard II, the Irish are unruly outsiders, and the Welsh are unreliable allies; in Henry IV, both the Welsh and the Scots are rebellious enemies of the crown. But in Henry V, English, Welsh, Irish, and Scottish soldiers fight side by side, putting aside their petty squabbles to focus on their common allegiance to Henry.” Henry himself is willing to celebrate his Welsh ancestry by accepting Fluellen’s leek, while Pistol is forced to eat the leek before he steals home to steal. Another sign of his effectiveness is the fact that the church, insofar as it appears at all, is strictly subordinate to the demands of the state.

But the more fundamental political theology of Henry V is simultaneously a sacramental theology, though a Reformed rather than Catholic one. Instead of assuming, as Richard II does, an identity of sign and thing, Henry recognizes (anachronistically inspired by the Anglican Prayerbook of Shakespeare’s day), in his great meditation on kingship in Act 4, that ceremony is nothing, a sign only, a fiction. Yet , he recognizes that the fictional sign is the creative source of political and social order. Henry both knows the fictionality of ceremony, and its power:

“To Hal, the ‘ceremony’ that distinguishes king from subjects is primarily a convergence of signs (‘place, degree, and form’ as well as the itemized catalogue he proceeds to give). And though this symbolic order of difference has no inherent power – a recognition unimaginable for Richard II – it unmistakably does matter, creating not only ‘awe and fear,’ but also, in turn, royal authority and the entire sociopolitical order. Hal’s soliloquy simultaneously recognizes both his genuine commonality with all his subjects and the genuine different made by the representational order of power.”

As is clear from the foregoing, one key element of what Rosendale calls a “sacramental” version of kingship is the participation of the populace: “royal authority is constituted and sustained through the interpretive cooperation of its subjects.” This also helps to account for the insistent theatricality of Henry V, which “highlights, to an exceptional degree, its own status as a theatrical work of literary representation, and explicitly enjoins its audience to imaginatively compensate for its limitations as such.” When the audience participates, the gaps are filled and the text is made “something that is real and powerful both despite and precisely because of its fictivity.”

In short, “Shakespeare demonstrates the constructive political potential of a recognizably Reformed sense of representation, in which ruler and subjects, actor and audience participate self-consciously in a positive and redemptive system of signs.” In doing this, “his history plays trace the rehabilitation of the uncertainty and fictivity of representation into a means of national salvation from sociopolitical chaos.”