In this sense it has been possible to read the book, not without reason, as one of our century’s great critical texts on the state and techniques of power. Yet anyone who has followed the patient work of analysis that leads from the macabre irony of Richard II and Plowden’s reports to a reconstruction of the formation of the doctrine of the king’s two bodies in medieval jurisprudence and theology cannot fail to wonder if the book really can indeed be read as only a démystification of political theology. The fact of the matter is that while the political theology evoked by Schmitt essentially frames a study of the absolute character of political power, The King’s Two Bodies is instead exclusively concerned with the other, more innocuous feature that, according to Jean Bodfn, defines sovereignty (puissance absolue et perpétuelle) – the perpetual nature of sovereignty, which allows the royal dignitas to survive the physical person of its bearer (Le roi ne meurt jamais, “The king never dies”). Here “Christian political theology” was, by means of analogy with Christ’s mystic body, directed solely toward the task of establishing the continuity of the state’s corpus morale et politicum (moral and political body), without which no stable political organization could be conceived. And it is in this sense that “notwithstanding . . . some similarities with disconnected pagan concepts, the king’s two bodies is an offshoot of Christian theological thought and, consequently, stands as a landmark of Christian political theology” (King’s Two Bodies, p. 434).