32

The Revival of the Empire and the Ghibelline Middle Ages

The tradition that shaped the Roman world manifested its power vis-à-vis Christianity in the fact that, although the new faith was successful in overthrowing the ancient civilization, it nevertheless was not able to conquer the Western world as pure Christianity; wherever it achieved some greatness it did so only thanks to Roman and classical pre-Christian elements borrowed from the previous tradition, and not because of the Christian element in its original form.

For all practical purposes, Christianity “converted” Western man only superficially; it constituted his “faith” in the most abstract sense while his real life continued to obey the more or less material forms of the opposite tradition of action, and later on, during the Middle Ages, an ethos that was essentially shaped by the Northern-Aryan spirit. In theory, the Western world accepted Christianity but for all practical purposes it remained pagan; the fact that Europe was able to incorporate so many motifs that were connected with the Jewish and Levantine view of life has always been a source of surprise among historians. Thus, the outcome was some sort of hybridism. Even in its attenuated and Romanized Catholic version, the Christian faith represented an obstacle that deprived Western man of the possibility of integrating his authentic and irrepressible way of being through a concept and in a relationship with the Sacred that was most congenial to him. In turn, this way of being prevented Christianity from definitely shaping the West into a tradition of the opposite kind, that is, into a priestly and religious one conformed to the ideals of the ecclesia of the origins, the evangelical pathos, and the symbol of the mystical body of Christ. Further on, I will closely analyze the effects of this double antithesis on the course of Western history; strictly speaking, this antithesis represented an important factor in the processes leading to the modern world.

In a particular cycle, however, the Christian idea (in those concepts in which the supernatural was emphasized) seemed to have become absorbed by the Roman idea in forms that again elevated the imperial idea to new heights, even though the tradition of this idea, found in the center constituted by the “eternal” city, had by then decayed. Such was the Byzantine cycle or the cycle of the Eastern Roman Empire. What occurred in the east, however, corresponded to what had previously occurred in the low empire. The Byzantine imperial idea displayed a high degree of traditional spirit, at least theoretically. For instance, it upheld the ideal of the sacred ruler (βασιλεύς αὐτοκράτορ) whose authority came from above and whose law, reflecting the divine law, had a universal value; also the clergy was subjected to him because the emperor was in charge of both temporal and spiritual affairs. Likewise, in the Eastern Empire the idea of the ρο μαîοι (the “Romans”) took hold and came to represent the unity of those who were elevated by the chrism inherent in the participation in the Roman-Christian ecumene to a dignity higher than any other people ever achieved. The empire once again was sacrum and its pax had a supernatural meaning. And yet, even more so than during the Roman decadence, all this remained a symbol carried by chaotic and murky forces, since the ethnic substance was characterized, much more so than in the previous imperial Roman cycle, by demon worship, anarchy, and the principle of undying restlessness typical of the decadent and crepuscular Hellenic-Eastern world. Here too, the Byzantine emperors incorrectly assumed that despotism and a bureaucratic, centralized administrative structure could achieve that which only proceeds from the spiritual authority of worthy representatives who surround themselves with people who had the quality of “Romans,” not just nominally, but imprinted in their inner character. Therefore the forces of dissolution were destined to prevail, even though Byzantium lasted as a political reality for about a millennium. What remained of the Byzantine Roman-Christian idea were mere echoes, partially absorbed in a very modified form by Slavic peoples and partially brought together again in that revival of tradition constituted by the Ghibelline Middle Ages.

In order to follow the development of forces that shaped the Western world, it is necessary to briefly consider Catholicism. Catholicism developed through (a) the rectification of various extremist features of primitive Christianity; (b) the organization of a ritual, dogmatic, and symbolic corpus beyond the mere mystical, soteriological element; and (c) the absorption and adaptation of doctrinal and organizational elements that were borrowed from the Roman world and from classical civilization in general. This is how Catholicism at times displayed “traditional” features, which nevertheless should not deceive us: that which in Catholicism has a truly traditional character is not typically Christian and that which in Catholicism is specifically Christian can hardly be considered traditional. Historically, despite all the efforts that were made to reconcile heterogeneous and contradictory elements,^[1] and despite the work of absorption and adaptation on a large scale, Catholicism always betrays the spirit of lunar, priestly civilizations and thus it continues, in yet another form, the antagonistic action of the Southern influences, to which it offered a real organization through the Church and her hierarchy.

This becomes evident when we examine the development of the principle of authority that was claimed by the Church. During the early centuries of the Christianized empire and during the Byzantine period, the Church still appeared to be subordinated to imperial authority; at Church councils the bishops left the last word to the ruler not only in disciplinary but also in doctrinal matters. Gradually, a shift occurred to the belief in the equality of the two powers of Church and empire; both institutions came to be regarded as enjoying a supernatural authority and a divine origin. With the passage of time we find in the Carolingian ideal the principle according to which the king is supposed to rule over both clergy and the people on the one hand, while on the other hand the idea was developed according to which the royal function was compared to that of the body and the priestly function to that of the soul;^[2] thereby the idea of the equality of the two powers was implicitly abandoned, thus preparing the way for the real inversion of relations.

By analogy, if in every rational being the soul is the principle that decides what the body will do, how could one think that those who admitted to having authority only in matters of social and political concern should not be subordinated to the Church, to whom they willingly recognized the exclusive right over and direction of souls? Thus, the Church eventually disputed and regarded as tantamount to heresy and a prevarication dictated by pride that doctrine of the divine nature and origin of regality; it also came to regard the ruler as a mere layman equal to all other men before God and his Church, and a mere official invested by mortal beings with the power to rule over others in accordance with natural law. According to the Church, the ruler should receive from the ecclesiastical hierarchy the spiritual element that prevents his government from becoming the civitas diaboli. Boniface VIII, who did not hesitate to ascend to the throne of Constantine with a sword, crown, and scepter and to declare: “I am Caesar, I am the Emperor,” embodies the logical conclusion of a theocratic, Southern upheaval in which the priest was entrusted with both evangelical swords (the spiritual and the temporal); the imperium itself came to be regarded as a beneficium conferred by the pope to somebody, who in return owed to the Church the same vassalage and obedience a feudal vassal owes the person who has invested him. However, since the spirituality that the head of the Roman Church incarnated remained in its essence that of the “servants of God,” we can say that far from representing the restoration of the primordial and solar unity of the two powers, Guelphism merely testifies to how Rome had lost its ancient tradition and how it came to represent the opposite principle and the triumph of the Southern weltanschauung in Europe. In the confusion that was beginning to affect even the symbols, the Church, who on the one hand claimed for herself the symbol of the sun vis-à-vis the empire (to which she attributed the symbol of the moon), on the other hand employed the symbol of the Mother to refer to herself and considered the emperor as one of her “children.” Thus, the Guelph ideal of political supremacy marked the return to the ancient gynaecocratic vision in which the authority, superiority, and privilege of spiritual primacy was accorded to the maternal principle over the male principle, which was then associated with the temporal and ephemeral reality.

Thus, a change occurred. The Roman idea was revived by races of a direct Northern origin, which various migrations had pushed into the area of Roman civilization. The Germanic element was destined to defend the imperial idea against the Church and to restore to new life the formative vis of the ancient Roman world. This is how the Holy Roman Empire and the feudal civilization arose, both of which represented the two last great traditional manifestations the West ever knew.

As far as the Germans were concerned, since the times of Tacitus they appeared to be very similar to the Achaean, paleo-Iranian, paleo-Roman and Northern-Aryan stocks that had been preserved, in many aspects (including the racial one), in a state of “prehistoric” purity. The Germanic populations—just like the Goths, the Longobards, the Burgundians, and the Franks—were looked down upon as barbarians by that decadent “civilization” that had been reduced to a juridical administrative structure and that had degenerated into “Aphrodistic” forms of hedonistic urban refinement, intellectualism, aestheticism, and cosmopolitan dissolution. And yet in the coarse and unsophisticated forms of their customs one could find the expression of an existence characterized by the principles of honor, faithfulness, and pride. It was precisely this “barbaric” element that represented a vital force, the lack of which had been one of the main causes of Roman and Byzantine decadence.

The fact that the ancient Germans were “young races” has prevented many scholars from seeing the full picture of earlier antiquity; these races were young only because of the youth typical of that which still maintains contact with the origins. These races descended from the last offshoots to leave the Arctic seat and that therefore had not suffered the miscegenation and the alterations experienced by similar populations that had abandoned the Arctic seat much earlier, as is the case with the paleo-Indo-European stocks that had settled in the prehistoric Mediterranean.

The Nordic-Germanic people, besides their ethos, carried in their myths the traces of a tradition that derived immediately from the primordial tradition. The fact that during the period in which they appeared as decisive forces on the stage of European history these stocks lost the memory of their origins, and that the primordial tradition was present in those stocks only in the form of fragmentary, often altered, and unrefined residues, did not prevent them from carrying as a deep, inner legacy the possibilities and the acquired weltanschauung from which “heroic” cycles derive.

The myth of the Edda spoke about both the impending doom and the heroic will opposed to it. In the older parts of that myth there remained the memory of a deep freeze that arrested the twelve “streams” originating from the primordial and luminous center of Muspelheim, located at the “far end of the earth”; this center corresponds to the Ariyana Vaego (the Iranian equivalent of the Hyperborean seat), to the radiant Northern Island of the Hindus, and to the other figurations of the seat of the Golden Age.^[3] Moreover, the Edda mention a “Green Land”^[4] floating on the abyss and surrounded by the ocean; according to some traditions, this was the original location of the “Fall” and of dark and tragic times, since it was here that the warm current of the Muspelheim (in this order of traditional myths, the waters represent the force that gives life to people and to races) met the frigid current of Huergehmir. Just as in the Zend-Avesta the freezing and dark winter that depopulated Ariyana Vaego was conceived as the work of an evil god opposed to the luminous creation, likewise this Eddie myth may allude to the alteration that precipitated the new cycle; this is true especially if we consider that the myth mentions a generation of giants and elemental telluric beings, creatures that were defrosted by the warm current, and against whom the race of the Aesir is going to fight.

In the Edda, the theme of ragna-rok or ragna-rokkr (the “destiny” or the “twilight of the gods”) is the equivalent of the traditional teaching concerning the four-stage involutive process; it threatens the struggling world, which is already dominated by dualistic thinking. From an esoteric point of view this “twilight” affects the gods only metaphorically; it also signifies the “dimming” of the gods in human consciousness because mankind loses the gods, that is, the possibility of establishing a contact with them. Such a destiny may be avoided, however, by preserving the purity of the deposit of that primordial and symbolic element—gold—with which the “palace of the heroes,” the hall of Odin’s twelve thrones, was built in the mythical Asgard. This gold, which could act as a source of good health so long as it was not touched by an elemental or by a human being, eventually fell into the hands of Albericus, the king of the subterranean beings that in the later editing of the myth are called the Nibelungs. This clearly shows the echo of what in other traditions was the advent of the Bronze Age, the cycle of the Titanic-Promethean rebellion, which was probably connected with the magical involution in the inferior sense of previous cults.^[5]

Over and against this stands the world of the Aesir, the Nordic-Germanic deities who embody the Uranian principle in its warrior aspect. The god Donnar-Thor was the slayer of Thym and Hymir, the “strongest of all,” the “irresistible,” the “Lord who rescues from terror,” whose fearful weapon, the double hammer Mjolrnir, was both a variation of the symbolic, Hyperborean battle-axe and a sign of the thunderbolt force proper to the Uranian gods of the Aryan cycle. The god Woden-Odin was he who granted victory and who had wisdom; he was the master of very powerful formulae that were not to be revealed to any woman, not even to the king’s daughter. He was the eagle; he was the host and the father^[6] of the dead heroes who were selected by the Valkyries on the battlefields; it was he who bestowed on the noble ones that “spirit that lives on and which does not die when the body is dissolved into the earth”;^[7] and he was the deity to whom the royal stocks attributed their origin. The god Tyr-Tiuz was another god of battles, and the god of the day, of the radiant solar sky, who was represented by the rune Y, which recalls the very ancient and Northern-Atlantic sign of the cosmic man with his hands raised.

One of the motifs of the “heroic” cycles appears in the saga concerning the stock of the Wolsungen, which was generated from the union of a god with a woman. Sigmund, who will one day extract the sword inserted in the divine tree, came from this stock. In this saga the hero Sigurd or Siegfried, after taking possession of the gold that had fallen into the hands of the Nibelungs, kills the dragon Fafnir, which is another form of the serpent Nidhoog. This serpent, in the action of corroding the roots of the divine tree Yggdrasil (its collapse will mark the twilight of the race of the gods), personifies the dark power of decadence. Although Sigurd in the end is killed by treachery and the gold is returned to the waters, he nevertheless remains the heroic type endowed with the tamkappe (the symbolic power that can transfer a person from the bodily dimension to the invisible), and predestined to possess the divine woman either in the form of a vanquished Amazonian queen (Brynhild, as the queen of the Northern Island) or in the form of a Valkyrie, a warrior virgin who went from an earthly to a divine seat.

The oldest Nordic stocks regarded Gardarike, a land located in the Far North, as their original homeland. This seat, even when it was identified with a Scandinavian region, was associated with the echo of the “polar” function of Mitgard, of the primordial “center”; this was a transposition of memories from the physical to the metaphysical dimension by virtue of which Gardarike was also identified with Asgard. Asgard allegedly was the dwelling place of nonhuman ancestors of the noble Nordic families; in Asgard, Scandinavian sacred kings such as Gilfir, who had gone there to proclaim their power, allegedly received the traditional teaching of the Edda. Asgard was also a sacred land, the land of the Nordic “Olympian” gods and of the Aesir, access to which was precluded to the race of the giants.

These motifs were found in the traditional legacy of Nordic-Germanic populations. As a view of the world, the insight into the outcome of the decline (ragna-rokkr) was associated with ideals and with figurations of gods who were typical of “heroic” cycles. As I have said, in more recent times this was a subconscious legacy; the supernatural element became obscured by secondary and spurious elements of the myth and the saga, as did the universal element contained in the idea of Asgard-Mitgard, the “center of the world.”

The contact of Germanic people with the Roman and Christian world had a double effect. On the one hand their invasion resulted in a devastation of the material structure of the empire, while from an internal point of view it turned out to be a vivifying contribution that eventually established the presuppositions of a new and virile civilization destined to reaffirm the Roman symbol. In later times, in the same way, an essential rectification of Christianity and Catholicism took place, especially with regard to a general view of life.

On the other hand, both the idea of Roman universalism and the Christian principle, in its generic aspect of affirmation of a supernatural order, produced an awakening of the highest vocation of Nordic-Germanic stocks; both ideas also contributed to the integration on a higher plane and to the revivification in a new form of what had often been materialized and particularized in them in the context of traditions of individual races.^[8] “Conversion” to the Christian faith, more than altering the Germanic stocks’ strength, often purified it and prepared it for a revival of the imperial Roman idea.

Many centuries ago, during the coronation of the king of the Franks, the formula renovatio Romani Imperii was spoken. Not only did they identify Rome as the symbolic source of their imperium and of their right, but the Germanic princes also ended up siding against the hegemonic demands of the Church; thus they became the protagonists of a great new historical movement that promoted a traditional restoration.

From a political perspective, the congenital ethos of the Germanic races conferred to the imperial reality a living, stable, and differentiated character. The life of the ancient Nordic-Germanic societies was based on the three principles of personality, freedom, and faithfulness. This life never knew the promiscuous sense of the community nor the inability of the individual to make the most of himself other than in the context of a given abstract institution; in these societies to be free was the measure of one’s nobility. And yet this freedom was not anarchical and individualistic, but it was capable of a dedication that went beyond the person, and it knew the transfiguring value that characterized the principle of faithfulness toward one who is worthy of obedience and to whom people willingly submit themselves. Thus, groups of devoted subjects rallied around leaders to whom the ancient saying did apply: “The supreme nobility of a Roman emperor does not consist in being a master of slaves, but in being a lord of free men, who loves freedom even in those who serve him.” Also the state, almost like in the ancient Roman aristocratic concept, was centered on the council of leaders, each member being a free man, the lord of his lands, and the leader of the group of his faithful. Beyond this council, the unity of the state and, to a degree, its superpolitical aspect, was embodied by the king, since he belonged, unlike mere military leaders, to one of the stocks of divine origin; the Goths, for example, called their kings amals, the “pure ones,” or the “heavenly ones.” Originally, the material and spiritual unity of the nation was manifested only in the event of a particular action or the realization of a common mission, especially an offensive or defensive one. And in that circumstance a new condition set in. Next to the king, a leader, dux, or heritzogo was elected, and a new rigid hierarchy was spontaneously established; the free man became the leader’s immediate subordinate. The latter’s authority allowed him to take the life of his subject if he failed in his duties. According to the testimony left to us by Tacitus, “the prime obligation of the entourage’s allegiance is to protect and guard him and to credit their own brave deeds to his glory: the chieftains fight for victory, the entourage for the chieftain.”^[9] Once the mission was accomplished, the original independence and pluralism were reestablished.

The Scandinavian counts called their leader “the enemy of gold,” since as a leader he was not allowed to keep any gold for himself, and also “the host of heroes,” because of the pride he took in hosting his faithful warriors, whom he regarded as his companions and equals, in his house. Even among the Franks prior to Charlemagne, participation in a particular mission occurred on a voluntary basis; the king invited people to participate, he appealed to them; at times the princes themselves proposed a course of action—in any event, there was neither “duty” nor impersonal “service,” since everywhere there were free and highly personalized relationships of command and obedience, mutual understanding and faithfulness. Thus, the idea of free personality was the foundation of any unity and hierarchy. This was the “Nordic” seed from which the feudal system arose as the background to the new imperial idea.

The development that led to such a regime began with the convergence of the ideas of king and leader. The king became the embodiment of the unity of the group even in time of peace; this was possible through the strengthening and the extension of the warrior principle of faithfulness to times of peace. A group of faithful retainers (e.g., the Nordic huskarlar, the Longobard gasindii, the Gothic palatines, the Frank antrustiones or convivae regis), consisting of free men, gathered around the king; these people regarded being in the service of their lord and the defense of his honor and right as both a privilege and a realization of a way of being more elevated than if they were merely answerable to no one but themselves. The feudal constitution was realized through the progressive extension of this principle, originally manifested in the Frank royalty, to various elements of the community.

During the period of conquests a second aspect of the abovementioned development took place: the bestowal of conquered lands as fiefs in return for the commitment to faithfulness. The Frank nobility spread into areas that did not coincide with those of any given nation and became a bonding and unifying element. From a formal point of view, this development appeared to involve an alteration of the previous constitution; to rule over a fief was regarded as a regal benefit contingent upon loyalty and service to the king. In reality, the feudal regime was a principle to be followed rather than a rigid reality; it was the general idea of an organic law of order that left ample room for the dynamic interaction of free forces fighting either side by side or against each other, without attenuations or alterations—subject before lord, lord before lord—and that caused everything (freedom, honor, glory, destiny, property) to be based on bravery and on the personal factor since nothing or virtually nothing was based on a collective element, public power, or abstract law. As it has rightfully been remarked, in the feudal system of the origins the fundamental and distinctive feature of regality was not that of a “public” power, but rather that of forces that were in the presence of other forces, each one responsible to itself for its own authority and dignity. Thus, such a state of affairs often resembled a state of war rather than that of a “society”; it was precisely because of this, however, that a particular differentiation of energies occurred. Never has man been treated so harshly as in the feudal system, and yet not only for the feudal lords who had the responsibility of protecting their rights and honor, but also for the subjects this regime was a school of independence and of virility rather than of servility; in this regime the relationships of faithfulness and of honor played a larger role than in any other Western time period.

Generally speaking, in this type of society, beyond the promiscuity of the Lower Empire and the chaos of the period of the invasions, everybody was able to find the place appropriate to his own nature, as is always the case wherever we find an immaterial catalyst within the social organism. For the last time in Western history the quadripartition of society into serfs, merchants, warrior nobility, and representatives of spiritual authority (the clergy in the Guelph and the ascetic, knightly orders in the Ghibelline system) took form and affirmed itself in an almost spontaneous way.

The fact that the feudal world of personality and of action did not exhaust the deepest possibilities of medieval man was proven by the fact that his fides was able to develop in a sublimated form and be purified into the universal: such was the form that had the Empire as its reference point. The Empire was perceived as a superpolitical reality, an institution of supernatural origin that formed one power with the divine kingdom. While in the Empire the same spirit that shaped the individual feudal and regal units continued to act, its peak was the emperor, who was regarded not as a mere man, but rather as a deus-homo totus deificatus et sanctificatus, adorandus quia praesul princeps et summus est, according to the characteristic expression of the time. Thus, the emperor embodied the function of a “center” in the eminent sense of the word and demanded from his subjects and from the feudal lords a spiritual acknowledgment similar to what the Church claimed for herself in order to realize a higher European traditional unity. Since two suns cannot coexist in the same planetary system, and since the image of the two suns was often applied to the duality of Church and Empire, the struggle between these two universal powers, which were the supreme reference points of the great ordinatio ad unum of the feudal world, was bound to erupt.

On both sides there were compromises and more or less conscious concessions to the opposing principle. The meaning of such a struggle, however, eludes both those who stop at a superficial level and at everything that from a metaphysical point of view is regarded as a mere occasional cause—thus seeing in it only a political competition and a clash of interests and ambitions rather than a material and spiritual struggle—and those who regard this conflict as one between two opponents who are fighting over the same thing, each claiming the prerogative of the same type of universal power. On the contrary, the struggle hides the contrast between two incompatible visions; this contrast points once again to the antithesis of North and South, of solar and lunar spirituality. The universal ideal of a “religious” kind advocated by the Church is opposed to the imperial ideal, which consists in a secret tendency to reconstruct the unity of the two powers, of the regal and the hieratic, or the sacred and the virile. Although the imperial idea in its external expressions often claimed for itself the dominion of the corpus and of the ordo of the medieval ecumene; and although the emperors often embodied in a mere formal way the living lex and subjected themselves to an asceticism of power^[10]—the idea of “sacred regality” appeared yet again on a universal plane. Wherever history hinted only implicitly at this higher aspiration it was the myth that bespoke it; the myth was not opposed to history, but rather revealed its deeper dimension. I have previously suggested that in the medieval imperial legend there are numerous elements that refer more or less directly to the idea of the supreme “center”; these elements, through various symbols, allude to a mysterious relationship between this center and the universal authority and legitimacy of the Ghibelline emperor. The objects symbolizing initiatic regality were entrusted to him and at times the motif of the hero “who never died” and who had been brought to a “mountain” or to a subterranean seat was applied to him. In the emperor dwelt the force that was expected to reawaken at the end of a cycle, cause the Dry Tree to bloom, and assist him in the last battle against Gog and Magog’s onslaught. Especially in relation to the Hohenstaufen, the idea of a “divine” and “Roman stock” asserted itself; this stock was believed not only to be in charge of the regnum but also to be able to penetrate the mysteries of God, which other people can only perceive vaguely through images.^[11] The counterpart of all this was a secret spirituality (see chapter 14) that was typical of yet another high point of the Ghibelline and feudal world: chivalry.

By producing chivalry that world demonstrated once again the efficiency of a superior principle. Chivalry was the natural complement of the imperial idea; between these two there was the same relationship as existed between the clergy and the Church. Chivalry was like a “race of the spirit” in which the purity of blood played an important role as well; the Northern-Aryan element present in it was purified until it reached a universal type and ideal in terms that corresponded to what the civis romanus had originally been in the world.

Even in chivalry we can distinctively see the extent to which the fundamental themes of early Christianity had been overcome and how the Church herself was forced to sanction, or at least to tolerate, a complex of principles, values, and customs that can hardly be reconciled with the spirit of her origins. Without repeating what has been said previously, I would like to recap the main points.

Within a nominally Christian world, chivalry upheld without any substantial alterations an Aryan ethics in the following things: (1) upholding the ideal of the hero rather than of the saint, and of the conqueror rather than of the martyr; (2) regarding faithfulness and honor, rather than caritas and humbleness, as the highest virtues; (3) regarding cowardice and dishonor, rather than sin, as the worst possible evil; (4) ignoring or hardly putting into practice the evangelical precepts of not opposing evil and not retaliating against offenses, but rather, methodically punishing unfairness and evil; (5) excluding from its ranks those who followed the Christian precept “Thou Shalt Not Kill” to the letter; and (6) refusing to love one’s enemy and instead fighting him and being magnanimous only after defeating him.

Secondly, the “test of arms” that consisted in settling all disputes through strength (regarded as a virtue entrusted by God to man in order to promote the triumph of justice, truth, and the law here on earth) became a fundamental idea that reached far beyond the context of feudal honor and law into the context of theology, in which it was applied under the name of “God’s ordeal,” even in matters of faith. This idea was not really a Christian one; it was rather inspired by the mystical doctrine of “victory” that ignored the dualism proper to religious views, united spirit and might, and saw in victory some sort of divine consecration. The theistic watered-down version of this doctrine, according to which during the Middle Ages people usually thought that victory was brought about by a direct intervention of God, did not affect the innermost spirit of these customs.

If chivalry professed “faithfulness” to the Church as well many elements suggest that this was a devotion similar to that tributed to various ideals and to the “woman” to whom a knight committed his own life; what really mattered to the knight and to his way was a generic attitude of heroic subordination of both his happiness and his life, rather than the issue of faith in a specific and theological sense. I have already suggested that both chivalry and the Crusades, besides their outer and exoteric aspect, also had an esoteric dimension.

As far as chivalry is concerned, I have already mentioned that it had its “Mysteries,” a temple that most definitely did not correspond to the Church of Rome, and a literature and sagas in which ancient pre-Christian traditions became alive again; among these things, the most characteristic was the saga of the Grail because of the emergence within it of the theme of initiatic reintegration, the goal of which was to restore a fallen kingdom.^[12] This theme developed a secret language that often concealed an uttermost disdain for the Roman Curia. Even within the great historical knightly orders, which were characterized by the peculiar tendency to reunite the types of the warrior and the ascetic, we find underground currents that, whenever they surfaced, brought upon these orders the suspicion and persecution of the official religion. In reality, chivalry was animated by the impulse toward a “traditional” restoration in the highest sense of the word, with the silent or explicit overcoming of the Christian religious spirit (see for instance the symbolic ritual of the rejection of the Cross allegedly practiced among the Knights Templar). The ideal center of all this was the Empire. This is how the legends arose that revived the theme of the Dry Tree, the blossoming of which was attributed to an emperor who will wage war against the clergy, so much so that at times he came to be regarded as the Antichrist (see for instance the Compendium theologiae); this was, on the part of the Church, an obscure and distorted expression of the perception of a spirituality irreconcilable with the Christian spirituality.

In the period in which victory seemed to be within the grasp of Frederick II, popular prophecies claimed: “The tall Cedar of Lebanon will be cut down. There will only be one God, namely, a monarch. Woe to the clergy! If it ever falls, a new order is ready to be implemented!”

During the Crusades, for the first and only time in post-Roman Europe, the ideal of the unity of nations (represented in peacetime by the Empire) was achieved on the plane of action in the wake of a wonderful élan, and as if in a mysterious reenactment of the great prehistoric movement from North to South and from West to East. The analysis of the deep forces that produced and directed the Crusades does not fit in with the ideas typical of a two-dimensional historiography. In the movement toward Jerusalem what often became manifested was an occult current against papal Rome that was fostered by Rome itself; in this current chivalry was the militia and the heroic Ghibelline ideal was the liveliest force. This current culminated in an emperor who was stigmatized by Gregory IX as one who “threatens to replace the Christian faith with the ancient rites of the pagan populations, and who by sitting in the Temple usurps the functions of the priesthood.” The figure of Godfrey of Bouillon—the most significant representative of crusader chivalry, who was called lux monarchorum (Which again reveals the ascetical and warrior element proper to this knightly aristocracy)—was that of a Ghibelline prince who ascended to the throne of Jerusalem after visiting Rome with blood and iron, killing the anti-Caesar Rudolf of Rhinefeld and expelling the pope from the holy city. The legend also established a meaningful kinship between this king of the crusaders and the mythical Knight of the Swan (the French Hélias, the Germanic Lohengrin^[13]), who in turn embodies symbols that were imperially Roman (his symbolic genealogical descent from Caesar himself), solar (the etymological relation between existing between Helias, Helios, and Elijah), and Hyperborean (the swan that leads Lohengrin from the “heavenly seat” was also the animal representing Apollo among the Hyperboreans and a recurrent theme in paleographic traces of the Northern-Aryan cult). The body of such historical and mythical elements causes Godfrey of Bouillon to be a symbol during the Crusades, because of the meaning of that secret force that had a merely external and contingent manifestation in the political struggle of the Teutonic emperors and in the victory of Otto I.

In the ethics of chivalry and the harsh articulation of the feudal system that was so distant from the social ideal of the primitive Church; in the resurrected principle of a warrior caste that had been reintegrated in a way that was both ascetical and sacred; and in the secret ideal of the Empire and the Crusades, the Christian influence encountered very precise limitations. On the one hand, the Church partially accepted these limitations; she allowed herself to be dominated—it became “Romanized”—in order to dominate and to remain in control. On the other hand, she resisted by attempting to replace the top of the political hierarchy and to overcome the Empire. The rending of the social fabric continued. The forces that were awakened occasionally escaped from the control of the people who had evoked them. When both adversaries disengaged from the mortal duel in which they were locked, they separately underwent a process of decadence. The tension toward the spiritual synthesis weakened. The Church increasingly renounced its claim to temporal power and royalty its claim to spiritual power. Following the Ghibelline civilization, which we may regard as the splendid spring season of a Europe that was destined to doom, the process of decadence will continue inexorably.

Footnotes

1. The origin of the majority of the difficulties and of the aporiae encountered in Catholic philosophy and theology (especially in Scholasticism and in Thomism) is essentially due to the spiritual incompatibility between the elements that were derived from Platonism and Aristotclianism on the one hand, and those that were specifically Christian and Jewish on the other. See L. Rougier, La Scolastique et le tomisme (Paris, 1930).

2. By divine decree the emperor must ensure that the Church fulfills her function and mission; thus, not only was he crowned with the same symbols proper to the priestly consecration, but he also had the authority and the right to demote and to banish unworthy clergy; the monarch was truly regarded as the king-priest according to the order of Melchizedek, while the bishop of Rome was merely the vicar of Christ. F. de Coulanges (Les Transfonnations de la royauté pendant l’époque carolingienne, [Paris, 1892]) rightly remarked that although Pepin, Charlemagne, and Louis the Pious swore to “defend” the Church, we should not be deceived by the meaning of this expression since in those days it had a different meaning than it does today. To defend the Church meant, in the parlance and in the mind-set of that period, to protect and exercise authority over her at the same time. What was called “defense” was really a contract that implied the state of dependence of the protected one, who was subjected to all the obligations the language of those times conveyed in the word fides, including swearing an oath of allegiance to the ruler. Charlemagne, when he took upon himself to defend the Church, also took on the authority and the responsibility of fortifying her in the “true faith.”

3. Considering the fragmentary character and the several strata of the tradition of the Edda, it is not easy to orient oneself in it without possessing an adequate preparation in the matter. For instance, we often find in the Edda that the Muspelheim (world of fire) was no longer located in the North and therefore made to correspond to the Nordic seat, while the Niflheim and the frost-giants inhabiting it, were. Conversely, after Muspelheim was invaded by the forces of the South, it quickly turned into its opposite, thus acquiring a negative value; it became the seat of Surtr (a fire demon), who will overcome the gods and usher in the end of a cycle. Also, the sons of Muspell became the enemies of the Olympian gods and will cause the Bifrost bridge (uniting heaven and earth) to collapse once they ride over it. See Voluspa, 50, 51.

4. In the names “Ireland” and “Greenland” (Grünes-Land = “the green land”) we find the idea of “green”; allegedly, up to the time of Procopius Greenland retained a lush vegetation.

5. It was probably in reference to this that the Nibelungs and the giants were represented as the creators of magical objects and weapons that will change hands and be acquired by the Aesir and the heroes (e.g., the hammer-thunderbolt of Thor; the golden ring and the magical helmet of Sigurd). A rather complex saga explains how these weapons and objects eventually turned into liabilities to the Aesir when they employed them in the reconstruction of the fortress of Asgard, which barred the way to the elementals (Gylfaginnig, 42).

6. According to the original Nordic-Gennanic view, the only people to enjoy divine immortality were, besides the heroes chosen by the Valkyries. the nobles, by virtue of their nonhuman origin; apparently, only heroes and the nobles were cremated. In the Nordic tradition only this ritual, prescribed by Odin, opened the doors of Valhalla while those who were buried (a Southern ritual) were believed to become slaves of the earth.

7. Gylfaginning, 3.

8. This double influence finds a typical expression in the Heliand. In this work, on the one hand Christ is portrayed with warrior and very unevangelical traits; on the other hand, we find the overcoming of that dark view of destiny (Wurd) that in later times will become dominant in German history. In the Heliand Christ is the source of the Wurd and this force finds in him its Master, thus becoming the “wondrous power of God.”

9. Tacitus. Germany, 14.

10. No matter how powerful and prideful, no medieval monarch ever felt capable of performing the function of the rite and the sacrifice (as with the ancient sacred kings) that had become the legacy of the clergy. Although the Hohenstaufen laid claim to the supernatural character of the Empire, they failed to reintegrate in their representative the primordial function of the rex sacrorum, even though the Church had usurped the title of pontifex maximus that was proper to the Roman emperors. Even in the Ghibelline doctrine of Hugh of Fleury, the sacred primacy of the Empire was limited to the ordo (that is, to the external constitution of Christianity) and was excluded from the dignitas, which belonged to the Church alone.

11. Ernst Kantorowicz spoke about the “empire breed” in reference to the Hohenstaufen: “A special virtue resided in this race, and to their offspring it was given ‘to know the mysteries of the kingdom of God … but to others only in parables.’ … The divine stock of the Roman Caesars appears once more in the Hohenstaufen, ‘the heaven-born race of the God Augustus, whose star is unquenched forever,’ a race which springs from Aeneas, the father of the Roman people, and descends through Caesar to Frederick and his offspring in direct descent. All members of this imperial race are called divine. The predecessors on the imperial throne are divi and the living no less, finally all members of the Hohenstaufen family… .

The imperial office had been held divine by Barbarossa; now gradually not only Frederick’s person but the Hohenstaufen race and the Hohenstaufen blood was caesarean and divine. But for one half-century of Staufen rule, the longed for Third Frederick whom the Sybils had foretold, and the West would have seen the God Augustus marching in the flesh through the gates of Rome, would have burnt incense on his altars and offered sacrifice. In the Hohenstaufens the son of God had appeared for the last time on earth.” From Frederick the Second, trans. E. O. Lorimer (New York, 1931), 572–73.

12. See my Il mistero del Graal. Though the “Grail’s regal character” was the central symbol of the secret Ghibelline tradition, the symbolical genealogy presented by Wolfram von Eschenbach shows the relalion existing between this tradition, the notion of “Universal Ruler,” and the anti-Guelph aspect of the Crusades. This genealogy connects the Grail’s kings with “Prester John” (who happens to be one of the medieval representations of the “Universal Ruler”) and with the Knight of the Swan, a symbolic name given to leaders of the Crusades such as Godfrey of Bouillon.

13. In the Knight of the Swan, whose homeland is in heaven and who turns down Elsa’s love, we find the antigynaecocratic theme proper of the heroic cycles already found in the myths of Heracles, Aeneas, Gilgamesh, Rostam, and so on.