33

Decline of the Medieval World and the Birth of Nations

The decadence of the Holy Roman Empire and, generally speaking, of the principle of true sovereignty was determined by a range of causes from above and below. One of the main causes was the gradual secularization and materialization of the political idea. As far as the Empire was concerned, the struggle Frederick II waged against the Church, though it was undertaken for the defense of its supernatural character, was associated with an initial upheaval in the following sense: on the one hand, there were (a) the incipient humanism, liberalism, and rationalism of the Sicilian court; (b) the institution of a body of lay judges and administrative functionaries; and (c) the importance given to the Law by legislators and by those whom a rightful religious rigorism (that reacted to the early products of “culture” and “free thought” with autos-da-fé and executions) contemptuously qualified as theologi philosophantes. On the other hand, there was the centralizing and antifeudal tendency of some recent imperial institutions. The moment an empire ceases to be sacred, it also ceases to be an empire; the inner vision animating the empire and its authority decline, and once the plane of matter and of mere “politics” is reached they totally disappear, since such a plane, by its very nature, excludes every universalism and higher unity. As early as 1338, King Ludwig IV of Bavaria declared that the imperial consecration was no longer necessary and that the elected prince was the legitimate emperor by virtue of this election; Charles IV of Bohemia completed this emancipation with the “Golden Bull.” Since the consecration, however, was not substituted with something metaphysically comparable, the emperors themselves irrevocably compromised their transcendent dignitas. From then on they lost “Heaven’s mandate” and the Holy Empire survived only nominally. Frederick III of Austria was the last emperor to be crowned in Rome (1452) after the rite had been reduced to an empty and soulless ceremony.

Conversely, it has rightfully been suggested that the feudal system is that which characterizes the majority of the great traditional eras and the one most suited for the regular development of traditional structures.^[1] In this type of regime the principle of plurality and of relative political autonomy of the individual parts is emphasized, as is the proper context of that universal element, that unum quod non est pars that alone can really organize and unify these parts, not by contrasting but by presiding over each one of them through the transcendent, superpolitical, and regulating function that the universal embodies (Dante). In this event royalty works together with the feudal aristocracy and the imperial function does not limit the autonomy of the single principalities or kingdoms, as it assumes the single nationalities without altering them. Conversely, when on the one hand the dignitas, which can rule triumphantly beyond the multiple, temporal, and contingent falls into decline; and when, on the other hand, the capability of a fides and a spiritual acknowledgment on the part of the single subordinated elements fails—then what arises is either a centralizing tendency and political absolutism (that attempts to hold the whole together through a violent, political, and state-enforced unity rather than through an essentially superpolitical and spiritual unity) or purely particularistic and dissociative processes. Either way accomplishes the destruction of medieval civilization. The kings begin to claim for their own fiefs the same principle of absolute authority that is typical of the empire,^[2] thus spreading a new and subversive idea: the national state. By virtue of an analogous process a variety of communes, free cities, republics, and other political entities that have a tendency to establish their independence, begin to resist and rebel, not only against the imperial authority, but against the nobility too. At this point the European ecumene begins to fall apart. The principle of a common body of laws declines, even though it leaves enough space for the articulations of a singular ius, that is a legislation that corresponds to the same language and a common spirit. Chivalry itself begins to decline and with it the ideal of a human type molded by principles of a purely ethical and spiritual nature; knights begin to defend the rights and to uphold the temporal ambitions of their lords, and eventually, of their respective national states. The great forces brought together by the superpolitical ideal of “holy war” or “just war” are replaced by combinations of both peace and war, which are increasingly brought about by diplomatic shrewdness. Christian Europe powerlessly witnesses the fall of the Eastern Empire and of Constantinople at the hands of Ottomans; moreover, a king of Prance, Francis I, inflicted the first deadly blow to the myth of “Christendom” that was the foundation of the European unity when, in his struggle against the representative of the Holy Roman Empire, he did not hesitate to side with the rebellious Protestant princes, and even with the sultan himself. The League of Cognac (1526) saw the head of the Church of Rome do something similar; Clement VII, the ally of the king of France, went to war against the emperor, siding with the sultan right when the onslaught of Suleiman II in Hungary threatened Europe and when Protestants in arms were about to ravage its heart. Also, a priest in the service of the king of France, Cardinal Richelieu, during the last phase of the Thirty Years War sided with the Protestant league against the emperor until, following the Peace of Augsburg (1555) the treaties of Westphalia (1648) swept away the last residue of the religious element, decreed the reciprocal tolerance between Protestant and Catholic nations and granted to the rebellious princes an almost total independence from the Empire. From that period on the supreme interest and the reason for struggle will not even be the ideal defense of a feudal or dynastic privilege, but mere disputes over parts of the European territory; the Empire was definitely replaced by imperialisms, that is, by the petty attempts of the national states to assert themselves either militarily or economically over other nations; this upheaval was in primis et ante omnia promoted by the French monarchy in a very specific anti-imperial manner.

In the context of these developments, besides the crisis suffered by the imperial idea, the idea of royalty in general became increasingly secularized; the king became merely a warrior and the political leader of his state. He embodied for a little longer a virile function and an absolute principle of authority, yet without any reference to a transcendent reality other than in the empty residual formulation of the “divine right” as it was defined in Catholic nations after the Council of Trent and during the age of the Counter Reformation. At that time the Church declared itself ready to sanction and consecrate the absolutism of sovereigns who had lost their sacred inner vocations as long as they were willing to be the secular arm of the Church, which by then had chosen to act indirectly upon European political affairs.

For this reason, in the period following the decline of imperial Europe, we witness in individual states the failure of the ideological premises that justified the struggle with the Church in the name of a higher principle; a more or less external acknowledgment was given to the authority of Rome in matters of religion in return for something useful to the “reason of state.”

Conversely, there were openly declared attempts to subordinate immediately the spiritual to the temporal sphere, as in the Anglican or Gallican upheaval and, later on, in the Protestant world, with the national churches under state control. With the unfolding of the modern era it is possible to witness the establishment of countries as if they were schisms, and their reciprocal opposition not only as political and temporal units but also as almost mystical entities refusing to submit to any superordained authority.

One thing becomes very clear: if the Empire declines and if it continues to exist only nominally, its antagonist, the Church, after enjoying untrammeled freedom from its ancient foe, did not know how to assume its legacy, and demonstrated its inability to organize the Western world according to the Guelph ideal. What replaced the Empire was not the Church at the head of a reinvigorated “Christendom,” but the multiplicity of national states that were increasingly intolerant of any higher principle of authority.

Moreover, the deconsecration of the rulers as well as their insubordination toward the Empire, by depriving the organisms over which they presided of the chrism bestowed by a higher principle, unavoidably pushed them into the orbit of lower forces that were destined to slowly prevail. Generally speaking, whenever a caste rebels against a higher caste and claims its independence, the higher caste unavoidably loses the character that it had within the hierarchy and thereby reflects the character of the immediately lower caste.^[3] Absolutism—the materialistic transposition of the traditional idea of unity—paved the way for demagogy and for republican, national, and antimonarchical revolutions. And in those countries in which the kings, in their struggle against feudal aristocracy and their work of political centralization favored the claims of the bourgeoisie and of the plebs, the process ended even faster. Philip the Fair, who anticipated and exemplified the various stages of the involutive process, is often singled out as an example. With the pope’s complicity he destroyed the Templar order that was the most characteristic expression of the tendency to reconstruct the unity of the priestly and the warrior elements that was the soul of medieval chivalry. He started the process of lay emancipation of the state from the Church, which was promoted without interruptions by his successors, just as the struggle against the feudal nobility was carried on (especially by Louis XI and by Louis XIV) without feeling any qualms about using the support of the bourgeoisie and without disavowing the rebellious spirit of lower social strata. Philip the Fair also favored the development of an antitraditional culture since his legislators were the true forerunners of modern laicism, being much earlier than the Renaissance humanists.^[4] If, on the one hand, it is significant that a priest (Cardinal Richelieu) employed the principle of centralization against the nobility by replacing the feudal structures with the leveling, modern, binomial form (government and nation), on the other hand, Louis XIV, with his formation of public powers and systematic development of national unity together with the political, military, and economic strengthening of this very unity prepared the body, so to speak, for the incarnation of a new principle: the people and the nation as a mere collectivity. Thus, the anti-aristocratic action of the kings of France—whose constant opposition to the Holy Empire has been noted—through the marquis of Mirabeau promoted the logical rebellion against these kings and their expulsion from their contaminated thrones. We can argue that since France initiated this upheaval and conferred an increasingly centralizing and nationalist character to the idea of the state, she was the first to witness the demise of the monarchical system and the advent of the republican regime in the sense of a decisive and manifest shift of power to the Third Estate. Thus, in the whole of European nations, France became the main hotbed of the revolutionary ferment and of the lay and rationalistic mentality, which is highly deleterious for any surviving residue of the traditional spirit.^[5]

There is another specific and interesting complementary aspect of historical nemesis. The emancipation of the Empire from the states that had become absolutist was followed by the emancipation of sovereign, free, and autonomous individuals from the state. The former usurpation attracted and presaged the latter; eventually, in the atomized and anarchical states (as sovereign nations) the usurped sovereignity of the state was destined to be replaced with popular sovereignity in the context of which every authority and law are legitimate only and exclusively as the expressions of the will of the citizens who are single sovereign individuals; this is the democraticized and “liberal” state, a prelude to the last phase of this general involution, that is, a purely collectivized society.

Beside the causes “from above,” however, we should not forget the causes “from below,” which are distinct though parallel to the former ones. Every traditional organization is a dynamic system that presupposes forces of chaos, inferior impulses, and interests as well as lower social and ethnic strata that are dominated and restrained by a principle of “form”; it also includes the dynamism of the two antagonistic poles. The superior pole, connected to the supernatural element of the higher strata, attempts to lift up the other pole, while the lower pole, which is connected to the mass or demos, attempts to pull down the higher pole. The emergence and liberation (i.e., revolt) of the lower strata are the counterpart of every weakening of the representatives of the higher principle and every deviation or degeneration of the top of the hierarchy. Therefore, because of the previously mentioned processes, the right of demanding of one’s subjects the double fides (spiritual and feudal) increasingly degenerated; thus, the way was paved for a materialization of this fides in a political sense and for the aforesaid revolt. In fact, just as faithfulness with a spiritual foundation is unconditional, likewise, that which is connected to the temporal plane is conditioned and contingent and liable to be revoked depending on the empirical circumstances. Also, the dualism of Church and state and the persistent opposition of the Church to the Empire were destined to. contribute to lowering every fides to this inferior and precarious level.

After all, during the Middle Ages it was the Church that “blessed” the betrayal of the fides by siding with the Italian communes and lending her moral and material support to their revolt against the Empire. The revolt of the communes, beyond the external aspect, simply represented the insurrection of the particular against the universal in relation to a type of social organization that was no longer even modeled after the warrior caste, but after the third caste, the bourgeoisie and the merchant class, who usurped the dignity of the political government and the right to bear arms, fortified its cities, raised its battle flags, and organized its armies against the imperial cohorts and the defensive alliance of the feudal nobility. Here began the movement from below and the rise of the tide of the inferior forces.

While the Italian communes anticipated the profane and antitraditional ideal of a social organization based on the economic and mercantile factor and the Jewish commerce with gold, their revolt demonstrated how, in some areas, the sensibility that embraced the spiritual and ethical meaning of loyalty and hierarchy was already at that time on the verge of becoming extinct. The emperor came to be perceived as a mere political leader whose political claims could be challenged. This marked the advent of that bad freedom that will destroy and deny every principle of true authority, abandon the inferior forces to themselves, and reduce to a merely human, economic, and social plane any political form, culminating in the omnipotence of the “merchants” first and of “organized labor” later. It is significant that the principal hotbed of this cancer was the Italian soil that had previously been the cradle of the Roman world. In the historical struggle of the communes, which were supported by the Church against the imperial armies and the corpus saecularium principium, we find the last echoes of the struggle between North and South, tradition and antitradition. The truth is that Frederick I—a figure whom the plebeian falsification of the Italian “patriotic” history has repeatedly attempted to discredit—fought in the name of a higher principle and out of a sense of duty, derived from his own function, against a lay and particularistic usurpation that was based, among other things, on unprovoked violations of pacts and oaths. Dante called him the “good Barbarossa” and regarded him as the legitimate representative of the Empire and the source of any true authority. Moreover, Dante regarded the revolt of the Lombard cities as an illegal and biased struggle due to his noble contempt for the “newcorners and upstarts”^[6] and for the elements of the new and impure power of the communes; likewise, he saw in the self-government of the individual populations and in the new nationalistic idea a subversive heresy.^[7] In reality, the Ottos and the Suevians waged their struggle not so much in order to impose a material acknowledgment or because of territorial ambitions, but rather for an ideal revendication and the defense of a superpolitical right. They demanded obedience not as Teutonic princes, but as “Roman” (romanorum reges) yet supernational emperors; they fought against the rebellious race of merchants and burghers in the name of honor and spirit.^[8] The latter came to be regarded as rebels, not so much against the emperor, but rather against God (obviare Deo). By divine injunction (jubente Deo) the prince waged war against them as the representative of Charlemagne, brandishing the “avenging sword” in order to restore the ancient order (redditur res publica).^[9]

Finally, especially in the case of Italy, in the so-called seigneuries (the counterpart or the successors of the communes) it is possible to detect another aspect of the new climate, of which Macchiavelli’s Prince represented a clear barometric index. During these times, the only person considered fit for government was a powerful individual who would rule not by virtue of a consecration, his nobility, and his representing a higher principle and a tradition, but rather in his own name and by employing cunning, violence, and the means of “politics,” which by then was regarded as an “art,” a technique devoid of scruples, honor, and truth with religion having become only an instrument to be employed in its service. Dante correctly said: “Italorum principum … qui non heroico more sed plebeo, secuntur superbiam.”^[10] Thus, the substance of such government was not “heroic” but plebeian; the ancient virtus descended to this level as did the sense of superiority to both good and evil typically exhibited by those who ruled on the basis of a nonhuman law. On the one hand, we see the reappearance of the model of ancient tyrannies; on the other hand, we find the expression of that unrestrained individualism that characterizes these new times according to multiple forms. Here we also find the anticipation, in a radical way, of the type of “absolute politics” and the will to power that in later times will be implemented on a much greater scale.

The cycle of the medieval restoration ended with these processes. Somehow we can say that the gynaecocratic, Southern ideal triumphed again; in the context of this ideal, the virile principle, apart from the abovementioned extreme forms, carried only a material (i.e., political and temporal) meaning even when it was embodied in the person of the monarch; conversely the Church remained the depository of spirituality in the “lunar” form of devotional religion and, at most, in the monastic and contemplative orders. After this scission occurred, the privilege of blood and the land or the expressions of a mere will to power became definitely predominant. An unavoidable consequence of this was the particularism of the towns, the homelands, and the various nationalisms. What followed was the incipient revolt of the demos, the collective element that was at the bottom of the traditional social order and that now attempted to take control of the leveled social structures and the unified public powers that were created during the previous, antifeudal phase.

The struggle that had most characterized the Middle Ages, that of the “heroic” virile principle against the Church, ended. From now on, Western man would yearn for autonomy and emancipation from the religious bond only in the forms of a deviation, in what could be characterized as a demonic distortion of Ghibellinism that was foreshadowed with the taking up of Lutheranism by the German princes. Generally speaking, after the Middle Ages, the West as a civilization became emancipated from the Church and from the Catholic weltanschauung only by becoming secularized under the aegis of naturalism and of rationalism, and by extolling as a sign of conquest the impoverishment proper to a perspective and a will that do not recognize anything beyond man and beyond what is conditioned by the human element.

One of the commonplaces of modern historiography is the polemical exaltation of the civilization of the Renaissance over and against medieval civilization. This is not just the expression of a typical misunderstanding, since this mentality is the effect of one among the innumerable deceptions purposely spread in modern culture by the leaders of global subversion. The truth is that after the collapse of the ancient world, if there ever was a civilization that deserves the name of Renaissance, this was the civilization of the Middle Ages. In its objectivity, its virile spirit, its hierarchical structure, its proud antihumanistic simplicity so often permeated by the sense of the sacred, the Middle Ages represented a return to the origins. I am not looking at the real Middle Ages and at its classical features through rose-colored lenses. The character of the civilization coming after it must be understood otherwise than it has been. During the Middle Ages the tension that had an essentially metaphysical orientation degenerated and changed polarity. The potential that was previously found in the vertical dimension (upwards, as in the symbol of Gothic cathedrals), flowed outward into the horizontal dimension, thus producing phenomena that made an impression on the superficial observer. In the domain of culture this potential produced the tumultuous outburst of multiple forms of a creativity almost entirely deprived of any traditional or even symbolic element, and also, on an external plane, the almost explosive scattering of European populations all over the world during the age of discoveries, explorations, and colonial conquests that occurred during the Renaissance and the age of humanism. These were the effects of a scattering of forces resembling the scattering of forces that follows the disintegration of an organism.

According to some, the Renaissance represented a revival of the ancient classical civilization that allegedly had been rediscovered and reaffirmed against the dark world of medieval Christianity. This is a major blunder. The Renaissance either borrowed decadent forms from the ancient world rather than the forms of the origins permeated by sacred and superpersonal elements, or, totally neglecting such elements, it employed the ancient legacy in a radically new fashion. During the Renaissance, “paganism” contributed essentially to the development of the simple affirmation of man and to fostering the exaltation of the individual, who became intoxicated with the products of an art, erudition, and speculation that lacked any transcendent and metaphysical element.

In relation to this, it is necessary to point out the phenomenon of neutralization. Civilization, even as an ideal, ceased to have a unitary axis. The center no longer directed the individual parts, not only in the political, but in the cultural context as well. There no longer was a common organizing force responsible for animating culture. In the spiritual space the Empire formerly encompassed unitarily in the ecumenical symbol, there arose by dissociation, dead or “neutral” zones that corresponded to the various branches of the new culture. Art, philosophy, science, and law each developed within their own field of competence, displaying a systematic and flaunted indifference toward anything that could encompass them, free them from their isolation, or give them true principles: such was the “freedom” of the new culture. The seventeenth century, together with the end of the Thirty Years War and the fundamental overthrow of the Empire, was the age in which this upheaval assumed a radical form, anticipating what is proper to the modern age.

Thus ended the medieval impulse to pick up again that torch that ancient Rome had received from the heroic, Olympian Bellas. The tradition of initiatory regality ceased to have contacts with historical reality and with the representatives of any European temporal power; it continued to exist only underground, in secret currents such as Hermeticism and Rosicrucianism, which increasingly withdrew inward as the modern world was taking form—when the organizations that they animated did not themselves undergo a process of involution and inversion.^[11] As a myth, medieval civilization left its testament in two legends. According to the first legend, every year on the night of the anniversary of the suppression of the order of the Knights Templar, an armed shadow wearing a red cross on its white mantle allegedly appears in the crypt of the Templars to inquire who wants to free the Holy Sepulcher: “No one,” is the reply, “since the Temple has been destroyed.” According to the second legend, Frederick I still lives with his knights, although asleep, on the Kifhauser heights inside a symbolic mountain. He awaits the appointed time when he will descend to the valleys below at the head of his faithful in order to fight the last battle, whose successful outcome will cause the Dry Tree to bloom again and a new age to begin.^[12]

Footnotes

1. R. Guénon, Autorité spirituelle et pouvoir temporel, 111.

2. The French legislators were the first in Europe to claim that the king of a national state derives his power directly from God and is the “emperor of his kingdom.”

3. R. Guénon, Autorité spirituelle, 111.

4. Ibid., 112.

5. Ibid. The fact that Germanic populations, despite the Reformation, retained feudal structures longer than other people is due to the fact that they were the last to embody—up to World War I—a higher idea than that represented by nationalisms and by world democracies.

6. Dante, The Divine Comedy, Inferno 16.73.

7. D. Flori, Dell’idea imperiale di Dante (Bologna, 1912), 38; 86–87.

8. Dante did not hesitate to criticize the growing nationalist aberration, particularly by opposing the French monarchy and by upholding the right of the emperor. In the case of Henry VII, he realized that if a nation like Italy, for instance, wanted to irradiate its civilization in the world it had to disappear into the Empile, since only the Empire is true universalism; thus, in his view, any rebellious force following the new principle upheld by “cities” and by homelands was destined to become an obstacle to the “kingdom of justice.”

9. These are Dante’s words. Interestingly enough, Barbarossa, in his struggle against the communes, was compared to Heracles, who was the hero allied to Olympian forces struggling against the forces of chaos.

10. De vulgari eloquentia, 1.12. In reference to the Renaissance F. Schuon has rightly spoken of a “Caesarism of the bourgeoisie and of the bankers”; to these I would add the figures of the condottieri, who were mercenary leaders who made themselves kings.

11. See my Il mistero del Graal, chap. 29, especially in regard to the genesis and the meaning of modern Masonry and of the Enlightenment, as prime examples of this inversion.

12. B. Kluger, Storia delle Crociate (1887). From the context of the various versions of the second legend what emerges is the idea that a victory is possible but not certain. In some versions of the saga—which were probably influenced by the Eddie theme of ragna rok—the last emperor cannot overcome the forces of the last age and dies after hanging his scepter, crown, and sword in the Dry Tree.