A sovereign act of negation

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