11
On the Hierarchical Relationship Between Royalty and Priesthood
If on the one hand the original synthesis of the two powers is reestablished in the person of the consecrated king, on the other hand, the nature of the hierarchical relationships existing in every normal social order between royalty and priestly caste (or church), which is merely the mediator of supernatural influences, is very clearly defined: regality enjoys primacy over the priesthood, just as, symbolically speaking, the sun has primacy over the moon and the man over the woman. In a certain sense this is the same primacy over Abraham’s priesthood that was traditionally attributed to the priestly regality of Melchizedek, who performed sacrifices in the name of the Almighty, the God of Victory (“God Most High who delivered your foes into your hand,” Gen. 14:20). As I have said, the medieval apologists of the Ghibelline ideal occasionally referred to the symbol of Melchizedek when laying claim, over and against the Church, to the privileges and to the supernatural dignity of the monarchy[1]
When referring to thoroughly traditional civilizations, it is helpful to employ Aryan or Indo-Aryan texts in order to emphasize that even in a civilization that appears to be characterized mainly by the priestly caste, the notion of the correct relationship between the two dignities was preserved to a large extent. In these texts, which I have previously quoted, it is said that the stock of the warrior deities arose from Brahman as a higher and more perfect form than Brahman itself. Reading on: “This is why nothing is greater than the warrior nobility (kṣatram); the priests (brāhmaṇa) themselves venerate the warrior when the consecration of the king occurs.”[2]
In the same text, the priestly caste that was assimilated to that Brahman (understood here in an impersonal manner and in an analogous sense to what in Christianity is considered to be the power, or dunamis, of the Holy Spirit), which is in its safekeeping, was represented as a mother or as a maternal matrix (yoni) in relation to the warrior or regal caste. This is particularly meaningful. The regal type is presented here according to its value as male principle, which surpasses, individuates, masters, and rules “triumphantly” over the spiritual force, which is conceived of as a mother and as a female.
Reference was made to ancient traditions concerning a type of regality that was attained by marrying a divine woman, often portrayed as a mother (this symbolizes incest, whereby the Egyptian king, in a broader context, was given the title of “his mother’s bull”). We are led again to the same point. Therefore, even when the rite of investiture is considered necessary, this does not establish or acknowledge the subordination of the king per se to the priestly caste. After the race of beings who are by nature more than mere human beings became extinct, a king was, prior to his consecration, simply a “warrior,” provided that he did individually rise to something higher through other means[3] But in the rite of consecration the king, rather than receiving, assumes a power that the priestly class does not own but rather has in custody; this power is then supposed to rise to a “higher form” that it did not possess before. Also, in consecration the virile and warrior quality of the person to be initiated frees itself and rises to a higher plane;[4] it then acts as an axis or as a pole of the sacred force. This is why the officiating priest must “worship” the king whom he consecrates, although the latter, according to a text, owes to the brāhmaṇa the respect owed to a mother. In the Manudharmaśāstra itself, although the primacy of the brāhmaṇa is upheld, the latter is compared to the water and to the stone, while the kṣatriya is compared to the fire and to iron. The text goes on to say that “rulers do not prosper without priests and priests do not thrive without rulers,” and that “the priest is said to be the root of the law, and the ruler is the peak.”[5] Odd as it may seem, these ideas originally were not totally alien to Christianity itself. According to the testimony of Eginhard, after Charlemagne was consecrated and hailed with the formula, “Long life and victory to Charles the Great, crowned by God, great and peaceful emperor of the Romans!” the pope “prostrated himself (adoravit) before Charles, according to the ritual established at the time of the ancient emperors.[6] In the time of Charlemagne and of Louis the Pius, as in the time of the Christian Roman and Byzantine emperors, the ecclesiastical councils were summoned, authorized, and presided over by the prince, to whom the bishops presented the conclusions they had reached, not only in matters of discipline but in matters of faith and doctrine as well, with the formula: “O Your Lordship and Emperor! May your wisdom integrate what is found lacking, correct what is against reason… .”[7] Almost as in an echo this bears witness to the fact that the ancient primacy and an undeniable authority over the priesthood, even in matters of wisdom, was attributed to the ruler. The liturgy of power, typical of the primordial tradition, still subsists. It was not a pagan, but Bossuet, a Catholic bishop (1627–1704),who declared in modern times that the sovereign is the “image of God ” on earth and who exclaimed: “You are divine though you are subject to death, and your authority does not die!”[8]
When the priestly caste, however, by virtue of the consecration that it administers demands that the regal authority should recognize the hierarchical superiority[9] of the priesthood (“unquestionably, a lesser person is blessed by a greater,” Heb. 7:7) and be subjected to it—such was, in Europe, the Church’s claim during the struggle for the investitures—this amounts to a full-blown heresy, totally subversive of traditional truths. In reality, as early as in the dark ages of prehistory we can detect the first episodes of the conflict between regal and priestly authority, since they both claimed for themselves the primacy that belongs to what is prior and superior to each of them. Contrary to common opinion, in the beginning this contrast was not motivated at all by a yearning for political hegemony; the cause of this conflict had a deeper root in two opposing spiritual attitudes. According to the prevalent form he was destined to assume after the differentiation of dignities, the priest is by definition always an interpreter and a mediator of the divine: as powerful as he may be, he will always be aware of addressing God as his Lord. The sacred king, on the other hand, feels that he belongs to the same stock as the gods; he ignores the feeling of religious subordination and cannot help but be intolerant of any claim to supremacy advanced by the priesthood. Later times witnessed the emergence of forms of an antitraditional anarchy that was manifested mainly in two ways: either as a royalty that is a mere temporal power in rebellion against spiritual authority; or as a spirituality of a “lunar” character in rebellion against a spirituality embodied by kings who were still aware of their ancient function. In both instances, heterodoxy was destined to emerge from the ruins of the traditional world. The first path will lead to the hegemony of the “political” element, the secularization of the idea of the state, the destruction of every authentic hierarchy, and last but not least, to the modern forms of an illusory and materialistic virility and power that are destined to be swept away by the power of the world of the masses in its collectivist versions. The second path will run parallel to the first; it will initially be manifested through the advent of the “civilization of the Mother” and through its pantheist spirituality, and later on through the varieties of what constitutes devotional religion.
The Middle Ages were the theater of the last great episode in the abovementioned conflict between the religious universalism represented by the Church and the regal ideal, embodied, though not without some compromises, in the Holy Roman Empire. According to the regal ideal, the emperor is really the caput ecclesiae, not in the sense that he takes the place of the head of the priestly hierarchy (the pope), but in the sense that only in the imperial function may the force that is represented by the Church and that animates Christianity efficaciously impose its dominion. In this context,
The world, portrayed as a vast unitary whole represented by the Church, was perceived as a body in which the single members are coordinated under the supreme direction of the Emperor, who is at the same time the leader of the realm and of the Church.[10]
The emperor, although he was constituted as such by the rite of investiture that followed the other investitures relative to his secular aspect of Teutonic prince, claimed to have received his right and his power directly from God and claimed to acknowledge only God above himself; therefore the role of the head of the priestly hierarchy who had consecrated him could logically be only that of a mere mediator, unable—according to the Ghibelline ideal—to revoke by means of excommunication the supernatural force with which the emperor had been endowed. Before the Gregorian interpretation subverted the very essence of the ancient symbols, the old tradition was upheld in lieu of the fact that the Empire had always and everywhere been compared to the sun as the Church had been compared to the moon. Moreover, even at the times of her highest prestige, the Church attributed to herself an essentially feminine symbolism (that of a mother) in relation to the king, whom she viewed as her “son”; the Upaniṣads’ designation (the brāhmaṇa as the mother of the kṣatram) appears again in this symbolism, this time in concomitance with the supremacist fancies of a gynaecocratic civilization marked by an antiheroic subordination of the son to the mother and by an emphasis on the mother’s privileges. After all, based on what I have discussed so far, it is clear that the very assumption of the title of pontifex maximus by the head of the Christian religion, the pope, turned out to be more or less a usurpation, since pontifex magnus was originally a function of the king and of the Roman Augustus. Likewise, the characteristic symbols of the papacy, the double keys and the ship, were borrowed from the ancient Roman cult of Janus. The papal tiara itself derives from a dignity that was not religious or priestly, but essentially initiatory, and from the dignity proper of the “Lord of the Center” or of the “sovereign of the three worlds.” In all this we can visibly detect a distortion and an abusive shift of dimension that, although they occurred in a hidden way, are nevertheless real and testify to a significant deviation from the pure traditional ideal.
Footnotes
1. In the Middle Ages, the mysterious figure of the royal Prester John replicated somewhat the figure of Melchizedek, while at the same time being related to the idea of a supreme center of the world. There is a legend according to which Prester John sent a salamander’s skin, fresh water, and a ring that bestowed victory and invisibility to “Frederick”; this legend expresses the confused belief in a relationship between the medieval imperial authority and some kind of transmission of the authority found in that center.
2. Bṛhad-āraṇyaka Upaniṣad, 1.4.11.
3. In the Hindu tradition there are plenty of instances of kings who already posses or eventually achieve a spiritual knowledge greater than that possessed by the brāhmaṇa. This is the case, for instance, of King Jaivala, whose knowledge was not imparted by any priest, but rather reserved to the warrior caste (kṣatram); also, in Bṛhad-āraṇyaka Upaniṣad (4.3.1) King Janaka teaches the brāhmaṇa Yājñavalkya the doctrine of the transcendent Self.
4. In a text called Pañcaviṁśati brāhmaṇa (18.10.8) we read that although in the regal consecration the formulations employed are the same as those inherent to the brāhmaṇa (the priestly caste), the latter has to be subjected to the kṣatram (the regal-warrior caste). The qualities that characterize the aristocrat and the warrior (rather than the priest strictly speaking) and that, once integrated in the sacred, reproduce the “solar” peak of spirituality, are the foundation of the well-known fact that in the highest traditions the priests, in the higher sense of the word, were chosen only from among the patrician families; initiation and the transmission of transcendent knowledge was reserved to these families alone.
5. The Laws of Manu, 11.321–22; 11.83–84.
6. De Coulanges, Transformations de la royaute pendant l’époque Carolingienne (Paris, 1892), 315–16. The Liber pontificalis says: “Post laudes ad Apostolico more antiquorum principum adoratus est.”
7. We may recall here that it was the emperor Sigismund who summoned the Council of Constance (A.D. 1413) on the eve of the Reformation in order to purify the clergy from schisms and anarchy.
8. Oeuvres oratoires, 4.362.
9. This Pauline expression can be contrasted with the symbolism of Jacob who struggles against the angel of the Lord and forces him to bless him.
(Gen. 32:27).
10. A. Solmi, Stato e Chiesa secondo gli scritti politici da Carlomagno al Concordato di Worms (Modena, 1901), 156. For the entire duration of the Roman Empire in the East, the Church was always a state institution dependent on the emperor, who exercised a universal rule. The beginning of the priestly usurpation can be traced back to the declarations of Pope Gelasius I (ca. 480).