Body
Once in North Korea I got my minder alone in a place in which our conversation could not be monitored and proceeded to have a wide-ranging multi-hour conversation. At one point he mentioned in passing that Kim Il-sung was God.
“I’ll grant you that,” I replied, “but what about Kim Jong-il?”
“Seventy-five percent God” came the reply.
The conversation moved on and I was never able to ascertain whether he meant that Kim Jong-il was some sort of a demigod or whether he meant that 75 percent of the people thought he was God and the other 25 percent held him in less exalted esteem. He also tried to explain North Korean ontology to me. As best as I can recall (and I am sure that I am not doing his explanation justice) in North Korean thought one has two bodies: a socio-economic (?) body that is corporeal and ceases to exist upon death, and a socio-political (?) or political-economic body(?) (I cannot remember the exact terminology), which, if one attains super high levels of consciousness, continues to exist past death—i.e. a conception of immortality. Kim Il-sung had achieved this state--that’s how he could be leader in perpetuity. The whole thing struck me as a kind of warped version of Christianity with the Kim Il-sung as the Father, Kim Jong-il as the Son, and the Korean Workers Party floating through the ether like the Holy Ghost. I was intrigued, but not really surprised, when I learned that Kim Il-sung had grown up in a Christian household.
I was reminded of all this when I came upon a fascinating book on medieval political theology by Ernst Kantorowicz titled The King’s Two Bodies. Turns out this notion of the “twinned” person of the king goes back at least to the 7th century and eventually came to play an important role in English legal theory regarding the monarch. The king has a body natural and a body politic; in his corporeal functions, he is a man like any other, but when he speaks for or as the state, he is enveloped in a "halo of perpetuity." Kanotowicz quotes William Blackstone’s Commentaries to the effect that the king “is not only incapable of doing wrong, but even thinking wrong: he can never mean to do an improper thing: in him is no folly or weakness...His Majesty in the eye of the law is always present in all his courts, though he cannot personally distribute justice.”
Such notions create all kinds of conundrums--regarding succession and the continuity of dynasties, for example, with which theorists spent centuries grapling. Kantorowicz concludes that while there are all kinds of antecedents of ruler deification extending back into the classical period and pagan antiquity, the specific theory of the King’s Two Bodies “is an offshoot of Christian theological thought and consequently stands as a landmark of Christian political theology.”
