12

Universality and Centralism

The ideal of the Holy Roman Empire points out the decadence the principle of regere [ruling] is liable to undergo when it loses its spiritual foundation. I will here anticipate some of the ideas I intend to develop in the second part of this work.

In the Ghibelline ideal of the Holy Roman Empire, two beliefs were firmly upheld: that the regnum had a supernatural origin and a metapolitical and universal nature, and that the emperor as the lex animata in terris and as the peak of the ordinatio ad unum, was aliquod unum quod non est pars (Dante) and the representative of a power transcending the community he governed; in the same way the Empire should not be confused with any of the kingdoms and nations that it encompassed, since in principle it was something qualitatively other, prior, and superior to each of them.^[1] There was no inconsistency—as some historians would have us believe—in the medieval contrast between the absolute right (above all places, races, and nations) the emperor claimed for himself by virtue of having been regularly invested and consecrated, and the practical limitations of his material power vis-à-vis the European sovereigns who owed him obedience. The nature of the plane of every universal function that exercises an all-encompassing unifying action is not a material one; as long as such a function does not assert itself as a mere material unity and power, it is worthy of its goals. Ideally speaking, the various kingdoms were not supposed to be united to the Empire through a material bond, whether of a political or a military nature, but rather through an ideal and spiritual bond, which was expressed by the characteristic term fides, which in Medieval Latin had both a religious meaning and the political and moral meaning of “faithfulness” or “devotion.” The fides elevated to the dignity of a sacrament (sacramentum tidelitatis) and the principle of all honor was the cement that unified the various feudal communities. “Faithfulness” bound the feudal lord to his prince, who was himself a feudal lord of a higher rank; moreover, in a higher, purified, and immaterial form, “faithfulness” was the element required to bring back these partial units (singulae communitates) to the center of gravity of the Empire, which was superior to them all since it enjoyed such a transcendent power and authority that it did not need to resort to arms in order to be acknowledged.

This is also why, in the feudal and imperial Middle Ages, as well as in any other civilization of a traditional type, unity and hierarchy were able to coexist with a high degree of independence, freedom, and self-expression.

Generally speaking and especially in typically Aryan civilizations, there were long periods of time in which a remarkable degree of pluralism existed within every state. or city. Families, stocks, and gentes made up many small-scale states and powers that enjoyed autonomy to a large degree; they were subsumed in an ideal and organic unity, though they possessed everything they needed for their material and spiritual life: a cult, a law, a land, and a militia. Tradition, the common origin, and the common race (not just the race of the body, but the race of the spirit) were the only foundations of a superior organization that was capable of developing into the form of the Empire, especially when the original group of forces spread into a larger space when it needed to be organized and unified; a typical example is the early history of the Franks. “Frank” was synonymous with being free, and the bearer, by virtue of one’s race, of a dignity that in their own eyes made the Franks superior to all other people: “Francus liber dicitur, quia super omnes gentes alias decus et dominatio illi debetur” (Turpinus). Up to the ninth century, sharing the common civilization of and belonging to the Frank stock were the foundations of the state, although there was no organized and centralized political unity coextensive with a national territory as in the modern idea of a state. Later on, in the Carolingian development that led to establishment of the Empire, Frank nobility was scattered everywhere; these separated and highly autonomous units, which still retained an immaterial connection with the center, constituted the unifying vital element within the overall connection, like cells of the nervous system in relation to the rest of the organism. The Far Eastern tradition in particular has emphasized the idea that by leaving the peripheral domain, by not intervening in a direct way, and by remaining in the essential spirituality of the center (like the hub of the wheel effecting its movement), it is possible to achieve the “virtue” that characterizes the true empire, as the single individuals maintain the feeling of being free and everything unfolds in an orderly way. This is possible because by virtue of the reciprocal compensation resulting from the invisible direction being followed, the partial disorders or individual wills will eventually contribute to the overall order.^[2]

This is the basic idea behind any real unity and any authentic authority. On the contrary, whenever we witness in history the triumph of a sovereignty and of a unity presiding over multiplicity in a merely material, direct, and political way—intervening everywhere, abolishing the autonomy of single groups, leveling in an absolutist fashion every right and every privilege, and altering and imposing a common will on various ethnic groups—then there cannot be any authentic imperial power since what we are dealing with is no longer an organism but a mechanism; this type is best represented by the modern national and centralizing states. Wherever a monarch has descended to such a lower plane, in other words, wherever he, in losing his spiritual function, has promoted an absolutism and a political and material centralization by emancipating himself from any bond owed to sacred authority, humiliating the feudal nobility, and taking over those powers that were previously distributed among the aristocracy—such a monarch has dug his own grave, having brought upon himself ominous consequences. Absolutism is a short-lived mirage; the enforced uniformity paves the way for demagogy, the ascent of the people, or demos, to the desecrated throne.^[3] This is the case with tyranny, which in several Greek cities replaced the previous aristocratic, sacral regime; this is also somewhat the case with ancient Rome and with Byzantium in the leveling forms of the imperial decadence; and finally, this is the meaning of European political history after the collapse of the spiritual ideal of the Holy Roman Empire and the ensuing advent of the secularized, nationalist monarchies, up to the age of “totalitarianism” as a terminal phenomenon.

It is hardly worth talking about the great powers that arose from the hypertrophy of nationalism that was inspired by a barbaric will to power of a militaristic or economic type and that people called “empires.” Let me repeat that an empire is such only by virtue of higher values that have been attained by a given race, which first of all had to overcome itself and its naturalistic particularities; only then will a race become the bearer of a principle that is also present in other peoples endowed with a traditional organization, although this principle is present only in a potential form. In this instance the conquering material action presents itself as an action that shatters the diaphragms of empirical separation and elevates the various potentialities to the one and only actuality, thus producing a real unification. The principle “die and become,” which resembles being hit by “Apollo’s thunderbolt” (C. Steding), is the elementary requirement for every stock striving to achieve an imperial mission and dignity; this is exactly the opposite of the morality of so-called sacred selfishness displayed by various nations. To remain limited by national characteristics in order to dominate on their basis other peoples or other lands is not possible other than through a temporary violence. A hand, as such, cannot pretend to dominate the other organs of the body; it can do so, however, by ceasing to be a hand and by becoming soul, or in other words, by rising up again to an immaterial function that is able to unify and to direct the multiplicity of the particular bodily functions, being superior to each one of them considered in and of themselves. If the “imperialist” adventures of modern times have failed miserably, often bringing to ruin the peoples that promoted them, or if they have been transformed into calamities of different kinds, the cause is precisely the absence of any authentically spiritual, metapolitical, and metanationalistic element; that is replaced instead with the violence of a stronger power that nonetheless is of the same nature as those minor powers it attempts to subdue. If an empire is not a sacred empire it is not an empire at all, but rather something resembling a cancer within a system comprised of the distinct functions of a living organism.

This is what I think about the degeneration of the idea of regere once it has become secularized and separated from the traditional spiritual basis: it is merely a temporal and centralizing idea. When considering yet another aspect of this deviation, one will notice that it is typical of all priestly castes to refuse to acknowledge the imperial function (as was the case of the Roman Church at the time of the struggle over the investitures) and to aim at a deconsecration of the concept of state and of royalty. Thus, often without realizing it, the priestly caste contributed to the formation of that lay and “realistic” mentality that unavoidably was destined to rise up against priestly authority itself and to ban any of its effective interferences in the body of the state. After the fanaticism of the early Christian communities, which originally identified the ruling Caesar’s empire with Satan’s kingdom, the greatness of the aeternitatis Romae with the opulence of the Babylonian prostitute, and the lictorian conquests with a magnum latrocinium; and after the Augustinian dualism, which contrasted state institutions with the civitas dei and considered the former as sinful (corpus diaboli) and unnatural devices—the Gregorian thesis eventually upheld the doctrine of the so-called natural right in the context of which regal authority was divested of every transcendent and divine character and reduced to a mere temporal power transferred to the king by the people. According to this thesis, a king is always accountable to the people for his power, as every positive state law is declared contingent and revocable vis-à-vis that “natural right.”^[4] As early as the thirteenth century, once the Catholic doctrine of the sacraments was defined, regal anointing was discontinued and ceased to be considered, as it had been previously, almost on the same level as priestly ordination. Later on, the Society of Jesus often accentuated the antitraditional lay view of royalty (even though they sided with the absolutism of those monarchies that were subservient to the Church, the Jesuits in some cases went as far as legitimizing regicide^[5]), in order to make it clear that only the Church enjoys a sacred character and that therefore every primacy belongs to her alone. As I have already mentioned, however, exactly the opposite came true. The spirit that was evoked overcame those who evoked it. Once the European states became the expressions of popular sovereignty and found themselves governed merely by economic principles and by the acephalous organizations (such as the Italian city-republics) that the Church had indirectly sponsored in their struggle against imperial authority, they became self-subsistent entities. These entities eventually became increasingly secularized and relegated everything that had to do with “religion” to an increasingly abstract, privatistic, and secondary domain and even used “religion” as an instrument to pursue their own goals.

The Guelph (Gregorian-Thomist) view is the expression of an emasculated spirituality to which a temporal power is superimposed from the outside in order to strengthen it and render it efficient; this view eventually, replaced the synthesis of spirituality and power, of regal supernaturality and centrality typical of the pure traditional idea. The Thomist worldview attempted to correct such an absurdity by conceiving a certain continuity between state and Church and by seeing in the state a “providential” institution. According to this view, the state cannot act beyond a certain limit; the Church takes over beyond that limit as an eminently and directly supernatural institution by perfecting the overall sociopolitical order and by actualizing the goal that excedit proportionem naturalis facultatis humanae. While this view is not too far off from traditional truth, it unfortunately encounters, in the order of ideas to which it belongs, an insurmountable difficulty represented by the essential difference in the types of relationship with the divine that are proper to regality and to priesthood respectively. In order for a real continuity, rather than a hiatus, to exist between the two successive degrees of a unitary organization (Scholasticism identified them with state and Church), it would have been necessary for the Church to embody in the supernatural order the same spirit that the imperium, strictly speaking, embodied on the material plane; this spirit is what I have called “spiritual virility.” The “religious” view typical of Christianity, however, did not allow for anything of this sort; from Pope Gelasius I onward the Church’s claim was that since Christ had come, nobody could be king and priest at the same time. Despite her hierocratic claims, the Church does not embody the virile (solar) pole of the spirit, but the feminine (lunar) pole. She may lay claim to the key but not to the scepter. Because of her role as mediatrix of the divine conceived theistically, and because of her view of spirituality as “contemplative life” essentially different from “active life” (not even Dante was able to go beyond this opposition), the Church cannot represent the best integration of all particular organizations-that is to say, she cannot represent the pinnacle of a great, homogeneous ordinatio ad unwn capable of encompassing both the peak and the essence of the “providential” design that is foreshadowed, according to the abovementioned view, in single organic and hierarchical political unities.

If a body is free only when it obeys its soul—and not a heterogeneous soul—then we must give credit to Frederick II’s claim, according to which the states that recognize the authority of the Empire are free, while those states that submit to the Church, which represents another spirituality, are the real slaves.

Footnotes

1. “The Emperor was entitled to the obedience of Christendom, not as a hereditary chief of a victorious tribe, or feudal lord of a portion of the earth’s surface, but as solemnly invested with an office. Not only did he excel in dignity the kings of the earth: his power was different in its nature; and so, far from supplanting or rivalling theirs, rose above them to become the source and needful condition of their authority in their several territories, the bond which joined them in one harmonious body.” James Bryce, The Holy Roman Empire (London, 1889), 114.

2. Tao te Ching, 3, 66.

3. R. Guénon, Autorite spirituelle et pouvoir temporel, 112.

4. I have discussed the real meaning of the primacy of the “natural law” over the positive and political laws (a primacy that is also employed as an ideological weapon by all kinds of subversive movements) in my edition of selected passages of J. J. Bachofen’s Myth, Religion and Mother Right and in my L’arco e la clava, chap. 8.

5. R. Fülöp-Miller, Segreto della potenza dei Gesuiti (Milan, 1931), 326–33.