Monotheistic Kingship: The Medieval Variants 9789633865507

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Monotheistic Kingship The Medieval Variants

Edited by Aziz Al-Azmeh Jânos M. Bak

Central European University Department of Medieval Studies & Pasts Incorporated: CEU Studies in the Humanities & Archaeolingua Budapest, 2004

© Editors and Contributors 2004 Copy Editor: Cristian Ga§par Printed in Hungary by Cover design for the series by Péter T6th Cover illustration based on the Khakhuli-Triptych, Tbilisi

Joint publication by Department of Medieval Studies, Central European University H-1051 Budapest, Nâdor u. 9., Hungary Telephone: (+36-1)327-3051, Fax: (+36-1)327-3055 E-mail: [email protected], Website: www.ceu.hu/medstud Past Incorporated: CEU Studies in the Humanities H-1051 Budapest, Nâdor u. 11., Hungary Telephone: (+36-1)235-6145, Fax: (+36-1)327-3191 E-mail: [email protected], Website: www.ceu.hu/past Central European University Press An imprint of the Central European University Share Company Nâdor u. 11, H-1051 Budapest, Hungary Telephone: (+36-1)327-3138, 327-3000, Fax: (+36-1)327-3183 E-mail: [email protected], Website: www.ceupress.com 400 West 59th Street, New York NY 10019, USA Telephone: (+1-212)547-6932, Fax: (+1-212) 548-4607 E-mail:[email protected] All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in retrieval system, or transmittes, in any form or by any means, without the permission of the Publisher ISSN 1587-6470 CEU Medievalia ISSN 1786-1438 Pasts Incorporated: CEU Studies in the Humanities ISBN 963 7326 05 7 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book is available upon request Printed in Hungary by AKAPRINT Kft. Budapest

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Editors'Preface

5

List of Contributors

7

A. Al-Azmeh: Monotheistic Kingship

9

Gy. Gereby: Carl Schmitt and Erik Peterson on the Problem of Political Theology. A Footnote to Kantorowicz

31

C. Ga§par: The King of Kings and the Holy Men: Royal Authority and Sacred Power in the Early Byzantine World

63

I. Garipzanov: David imperator augustus... Changing Iconography of Carolingian Rulership

89

N. Gussone: Religion in a Crisis of Interregnum: The Role of Religion in Bridging the Gap Between Otto III and Henry II

119

A. Schmelowszky: Messianic Dreams and Political Reality: The Case of Don Isaac Abravanel

137

S. Rapp: Images of Royal Authority in Early Christian Georgia: The Impact of Monotheism?

155

I. Karaulashvili: King Abgar of Edessa and the Concept of a Ruler Chosen by God

173

G. Tamer: Monotheismus und Politik bei Alfarabi

191

Z. Dalewski: Vivatprinceps in eternum\ Sacraüty of Ducal Power in Poland in the Earlier Middle Ages

215

E. Nemerkenyi: The Religions Ruler in the Institutions of St. Stephen of Hungary

231

O. Tolochko: Problems of Religious Legitimation of the Rurikides of Rus'

249

V. Petrukhin: A Note on the Sacral Status of the Khazarian Khagan: Tradition and Reality

269

G. Moreno-Riano: Marsilius of Padua on Rulership

277

Index of proper names

289

EDITORS' PREFACE

The present volume grew out of one of the annual interdisciplinary workshop of the Department of Medieval Studies at Central European University (in cooperation with the international association "Majestas") in February 2002, on "Religion and Rulership." We started out from the proposition—seemingly self-evident— that religion and above all monotheism has been a central element in the legitimization and representation of monarchy in its various forms, at any rate, in the pre-modern period. Some of the articles presented here have been discussed in an earlier version at that workshop, others have been solicited by the editors, wishing to cover as many variations of the medieval experience of monotheisticmonarchical rulership, as possible. The over-all problem of "monotheistic kingship" is presented by Aziz AlAzmeh who advocates a comparativism sustained by an historical anthropology of sacral kingship. He does so with reference to imperial structures with an ecumenical monotheistic vocation, most specifically those of Late Antiquity and its extensions into Byzantium and the Caliphate, but also with reference to the adoption of monotheism by one people newly arrived, the Anglo-Saxons of England. In all, an approach is put forward which seeks to go beyond the abstract propositional content of "political thought," and which takes in the implications of royalist iconography, ceremonial, cult, and metaphors and analogies of royalty and divinity. Gyorgy Gereby outlines ways in which trends in scholarship are inseparable from politics and ideology very broadly conceived, and the lessons are salutary for all, not least those who do not like comparison. Gereby also brings out the limits of the yearning for propositional consistency in political theory, which is always ultimately political, even Peterson's, where Augustinianism is put to the test of comprehensiveness within the text and without regard to the dependence of the text on the outside: as if political thinkers were German university professors called upon to pronounce themselves without contradiction, in a sort of textual animism. The articles on religion and rulership in late antique and medieval Europe (the Carolingian the Ottoman and the late medieval empire, Poland, Hungary, Rus') and the regions adjacent to its core (early Byzantium, Georgia, Armenia, the Khazars) provide material that invites comparatism: the recurrence of themes across times and spaces in the context of kingship and the divine: magical properties of icons (broadly understood: icons, statues, representations of different sorts, relics like the mandylion, all of them performing a magical act of conjuration); the authoritative quality of canonical quotations and the timelessness of typology (royalist Davidism, or Constantinism, for instance); how sacrality in the ecumenical sense interjects herself the moment a barbarian nation is incorporated into

6

EDITORS' PREFACE

monotheistic ecumenism (Rurikids, Georgians); the spectrum o f possibility o f divine/royal associations from the loftiest Neoplatonic register o f rulership down the line to mere princelings. While during our workshop some attempt was made to spell out the comparative aspects, not enough "case studies" are as yet available to allow the authors to enter a seriously—and not merely superficial— comparative treatment. Future studies will have to explore in detail the two general questions o f comparatism: what o f these similar and dissimilar elements are due to imperial "cultural transfer" (in our case, mainly from the Near Eastern and Mediterranean civilisations to the "new peoples") and which rest on particular interpretation o f local-gentile or common (Scriptural) bases. The different ways in which the same or similar texts and objects are applied to the sacral legitimization project may tell something not only o f the multisemic character o f the roots, but also o f the specific temporal, spatial and (geo)political conditions o f the given monarchy. While these examples are essentially connected to monotheism o f the Christian version (if that's what it is) we invited two authors to look at the issue from the vantage point o f medieval Jewish and Muslim political thought. Surely, that spectrum is much wider than what the two selected thinkers—Don Abravanel and Alfarabi—represent, but half a loaf is more than none. Still, both o f them address issues that remained part o f the non-Christian monotheistic political discourse, addressing as they do, the problem o f revelation versus political reality and ethics o f rulership in this world and the one to come. We did not intend to offer an all-embracing "coverage" o f the problem, not even one for the core areas o f medieval civilization in its wider European context. Still, many additional questions could—and should in the future—be addressed. Among these, the growing henotheism o f the pagan Late Roman Empire philosophically expressed in terms o f a subordinationist theology, the problem o f legitimization by images (challenging the Abrahamic religions' iconoclastic principle), the impact o f non-monotheist (or partly so) monarchies, such as Persia, are definite desiderata. It is clear that there is some kind o f theology included in all monarchical—and imperial—ideas, but their respective importance for the sustenance o f political structures needs closer look, whether there is a "political theology" per se, or not. T h e editors are indebted to Cristian Ga§par for meticulous editorial assistance; his careful and critical comments on the texts with professional expertise and wide knowledge o f the field would in fact qualify him as co-editor. We are pleased that the Department o f Medieval Studies at C E U accepted this volume into the series " C E U Medievalia" and Pasts Inc. Center for Historical Studies into its series C E U Studies in the Huminities. This dual sponsorship was o f great value to us not only in technical terms but also as an indicator o f the interdisciplinary character o f the volume. Finally, the editors apologize for the delay in publishing especially to those authors who had submitted their contribution long ago.

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

A^

AlA^meh Humanities Centre, CEU, Budapest azizalazmeh@hotmail. com

Zbigniew Dalemki Institute of History, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw [email protected] Ildar Garip^anov Center for Medieval Studies, Bergen [email protected] Cristian Gajpar Dept. of Medieval Studies, CEU, Budapest mphgas91 @phd.ceu.hu Gyorgy Gereby Dept. of Medieval Studies, CEU; Dept. of Philosophy, ELTE, Budapest [email protected] Nikolaus Gussone Besselweg 25, D—48149 Miinster Irma Karaulashvili Tbilisi/Princeton [email protected] Gerson Moreno-Riano Department of Social Sciences and History, Cedarville University, Cedarville, OH [email protected] Elod Nemerkenyi Dept. of Medieval Studies, CEU, Budapest mphneeO 1 @phd. ceu.hu Vladimir Ja. Petrukhin Insitute of Slavonic Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow [email protected]

8

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Steven H. Kapp Dept. of History, Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA his [email protected]. edu A.goston Schmelows^ky Budapest [email protected] Georges Tamer Friedrich Alexander Universität, Erlangen-Niirnberg [email protected]. Oleksyi Tolochko Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, Kiev [email protected]

9 MONOTHEISTIC KINGSHIP

A^AlA^meh

"[die Kultur ist] recht eigentlich die fromme und ordnende, ich möchte sagen, begütigende Einbeziehung des Ungeheueren in den Kultus der Götter." Thomas Mann "Eine politisch-religiöse Feierlichkeit hat einen unendlichen Rei^. Wir sehen die irdische Majestät vor Augen, umgeben von allen Symbolen ihrer Macht; aber indem sie sich vor der himmlichen beugt, bringt sie uns die Gemeinschaft beider vor die Sinne. Denn auch der einzelne vermag seine Verwandtschaft mit der Gottheit nur dadurch betätigen, dass er sich unterwirft und anbetet." J. - W. von Goethe I should like to state at the very beginning my conviction that sacral kingship, in its variety of forms and representations one of which is monotheistic kingship, might in anthropological terms be regarded an Elementary Form of socio-political life: not an autonomous elementary form, but one subsumable under that of rulership, of sovereignty in the sense given to the term by Georges Dumezil, without this necessarily entailing the adoption of his trifunctional model which Le Goff and Duby saw to be eminently fitting for medieval Europe. Like all other Elementary Forms for the representation of human sociality, this is one of a historical character which was central to the political and religious life of virtually all polities—not the least paradigmatic of which is the history of ancient Egypt—prior to the great transformation that overcame us all beginning with the seventeenth century. It is an Elementary Form in which sovereign and deity are related by manners and degrees of identification and mimesis. At one extremity of this spectrum of possible relations, full identity ontologically understood is expressed in epiphany, transsubstantiality and consubstantiality. At the other extremity, the relationship is expressed in terms of a variety of mimetic strategies comprehended by the figures of apostolate, prophecy, and priesthood, or by the altogether more nebulous and spectral—but nevertheless effective—tropes of representation, such as "the shadow of God on earth," a trope that goes at least as far back as the Assyrians and was later to be so important in discourses on Muslim kingship. I do not, alas, have the opportunity here to discuss why sacral kingship should be such an Elementary Form, or why Hocart in his famous work was moved to assert that "We have no right, in the present state of our knowl-

10

Aziz

AL-AZMEH

edge, to assert that the worship of gods preceded that of kings ... Perhaps there never were any gods without kings, or kings without gods."1 This is a matter that would take us into a discussion of psychoanalytic, socialpsychological, and anthropological theories that recall names such as Sigmund Freud, Emile Durkheim, Pierre Clastres, René Girard, Rudolf Otto, and many others. This is particularly unfortunate for me, as I do so much wish to think through that most compelling tautology implied by Durkheim's (and, before him, Feuerbach's) conception of the sacred as an irreducible form of societal self-representation,2 as something not amenable to specific formulation apart from its relationship to its profane contrary, indeed as "a category of the sensibility" or "a veritably immediate datum of consciousness."3 I will therefore have to rest content with asserting that sacral kingship was a constant motif in all royalist and imperial arrangements that spanned the entire oecumenical expanse of Eurasia from the very dawn of recorded history until modern times, a vast perspective in which the primitive republicanist image of Rome or of Athens seems aberrant, paltry and inconsequential, if indeed this image of republicanist purity, of the splendid childhood of rational political man, has any historical credibility apart from Jacobin and proto-Jacobin imaginings. Before going any further with the comparative perspective I was asked to present, a few prefatory words on sacrality will nevertheless be in order. Sacrality, like kingship, expresses principally a relationship articulated in dominant transcendence: it denotes irreducible removal, a structure of irreducible polarity and subordination, a hierarchical instance beyond hierarchy, a self-referential purity beyond purity and impurity as normally perceived, a sheer energetic potency incommensurate with any gradations of power. Nevertheless, transcendent sacrality may and often does substantively inseminate lower beings, like kings, or may cast its potent shadow upon them; it is not, like Aristotles's supreme being, a passive instance of self-reflection and selfreferentiality, but is rather related in dominance in a manner that is rather Platonic, or, better, Neo-Platonic. Eliade was perfectly correct in maintaining that Plato was "the outstanding philosopher" of primitive mentalities, mentalities which, he proposed, are not confined to so-called primitive peoples.4 From this statement a number of implications may be drawn, not the least important of which, for my purpose, is that this relationship, articulated in the transcendent dominance of the sacred, is one in which the structure of the

1

A. M. Hocart, Kingship (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927), p. 7. E. Durkheim, The'ElementaryForms of the Religious Life, trans. Joseph Ward Swain (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1915), pp. 4 2 3 - 4 and passim. 3 R. Caillois, L'Homme et le sacré (Paris: Gallimard, 1950), p. 18. 4 M. Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Pantheon Books, 1954), p. 34. 2

MONOTHEISTIC KINGSHIP

11

cosmos, like that of political society under royal aegis, is articulated by diminishing degrees of mimetic capacity. I will be more specific. To these diminishing degrees of mimetic capacity correspond greater degrees of pollution, of adulteration with materiality, with humanity increasingly more common and soiled. Yet this structure of continuous passage across degrees and ways of commensurability—from identity through to shadowy reflections, as I indicated—is nevertheless governed by an irreducible categorical distinction, indifferently distinguishing, in parallel, God from man and king from subject, and relating God and king together in an altogether common distinction from the common run of humanity in such a way that Louis IX of France could state that "li rois ne tient de nului, fors de Dieu et de lui." 5 I am perhaps anticipating too much of what will come in other papers in this collection by this direct reference to St. Louis in the thirteenth century, for the complex history of the relationship between gods and kings is a very long one, and is yet remarkably constant. This is not a history that I might reasonably hope to sketch on this occasion. What I wish to suggest are some considerations on the constant motifs involved in enunciations about oecumenical sacral kingship, which connect deity and king by relations of emanation, analogy, genealogy, metonymy, figuration, and apostolate, all of these involving functional parity between king and god, a mundane parity realised by mimesis, by rhetorical or substantive participation in the three common terms held by both of them: limitless energy, boundless majesty, and absolute virtue. Let it be said at this stage that I have used the word "enunciations" quite deliberately, as the enunciations of kingship I have in mind, albeit largely discursive, are also iconographic, ceremonial, ritual, and magical, all of these equally performing the function of crystallising royal energy in tangible and transmissible forms, crystallising it in virtually immobile formal and formulaic moulds that freeze out history, politics and society and render complete the impeccability of kingship, immune from pollution, and reflecting it in the verbal, iconographic, and ceremonial cultivation of the impeccable majesty attaching to the royal person. Let it moreover be quite clear here and elsewhere that by not using the term Elementary Forms much in what follows, I am not thereby losing the thread of the concept, but quite simply scrutinising it in its enunciative articulation and not in its functional aspect. Before I start reviewing some relevant historical material I should add the following caveats: I do not mean to imply that all enunciations about kingship are sacral, nor do I by any means wish to imply that all such enuncia-

5

J. Le Goff, Saint Louis (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), p. 74.

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Aziz A L - A Z M E H

tions rest by necessity upon the full realisation of the despotic potential latent to them. Not all impeccable sacred emperors in Baghdad and Constantinople enjoyed the limitless power or deployed the boundlessness energy attributed to them, and the hightened hallucinatory character of enunciations concerning the sublimity of the imperial office did not often tally with political realities: witness, for instance, the conjunction of vox dei and voxpopuli in the acclamation of Byzantine emperors by their assertive and demanding armies, or the receipt by overpowering kings of their investiture with almost absolute rule in Baghdad in the course of humiliating ceremonials before Caliphs dependent upon their bounty and protection (this might remind some of us of the relationship at certain points in time between the Basileus in Constantinople and Bulgarian and Serbian kings, of the conferment upon Clovis of an honorary Consulate, or of the so-called Donatio Constantini, only revealed as a fraud by Lorenzo Valla's argument from anachronism during the Quattrocento). Witness also the conjunction of divine unction and Frankish esprit de clan in Carolingian coronation ceremonies, and, of course the deliciously euphemistic vagueness of discourse on the term potestas ligandi et solvendi, so very important to the central legal conception Muslim kingship under the name of ahl al-hall wa'l-'aqd, and in all cases a polite euphemism for kingmakers who were by no means always polite—or consider, indeed, Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain, reigning by Grace of God yet entirely subject to her Parliament and Prime Minister. And finally, the reference to Elementary Forms with which I opened my talk militates against, and indeed renders virtually irrelevant, the habitual rigidity with which categorical distinctions are made between polytheistic and monotheistic kingship, and by extension renders genetically connected Byzantine, Muslim, and Latin enunciations on sacral kingship, beyond any civilisational divisions that might be imagined in terms of a totemic geography of Orient and Occident or of Islam, Orthodoxy, and the West. ***

In close connection with the contention I have just made about the illusory character of certain categorical distinctions, arising from institutional academic inertia no less than from ideological and political exigencies, is the main thesis that I wish to propose: Far from being genetically closed in any conceivable manner, monotheistic kingship in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, and beyond, is but a constellation of specific inflections within the more general phenomenon or Elementary Form of sacral kingship, just as monotheism is a specific theological and cultic inflection within the more general Form of the theological, political and social manifestations of divinity.

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13

For it might very well be asked whether the contrast between monotheism and polytheism is at all relevant to notions of divinity in general, quite apart from its interest to the history of religions. It might, further, be maintained that the notion of polytheism itself is a polemical notion arising from monotheistic self-definition, and is of doubtful systematic and analytical value, just as it could be maintained that there is little historical force to the deistic notion, much elaborated in the nineteenth century, that polytheism is a degenerate form of an original monotheism, or of Hume's theory (later taken up by nineteenth century Muslim reformers such as Afghani and Muhammad 'Abduh) that the history of religions is one of evolution from polytheism to monotheism. 6 Be that as it may, it can be maintained that, in conceptual terms, transitions from sacral kingship of a polytheistic to one of a monotheistic profession of faith have generally been fairly smooth at the conceptual level, and required in general what we might characterise as adjustments in terms of rhetorical and sometimes institutional transferences. If we were almost randomly to select for consideration a relatively simple, local and clannish polity such as that of Anglo-Saxon England, we would observe a number of patterns supervening in the transition between pagan and Christian kingship which repeated developments in more complex and more central polities, most specifically that of the central areas of late Romanity. Relationships of filiation as well as transference of capacity had related the supreme deity to these Germanic kings of England, 7 whose authority derived from their being sprung from Woden. Of the eight Anglo-Saxon royal genealogies that survive, seven record descent from Woden. With the christianisation of these kingdoms, at least one did not shed these memories, duly inscribed in an appropriate new register, as Aethelwulf of Wessex in the ninth century recorded Woden as the sixteenth descendent from Scalf, son of Noah, born on the Ark during the Deluge, and therefore a collateral cousin of Jesus Christ himself. In all cases, it seems that the authority of Christ, like that of kings, was understood as deriving from the force of descent, he being the Son of God, just as Aethelwulfs authority derived from his descent, and his status as the kinsman of Jesus, however distant.

G. Ahn, " 'Monotheismus' — 'Polytheismus'. Grenzen und Möglichkeiten einer Klassifikation von Gottesvorstellungen," in Mesopotamica-Ugaritica-Biblica. Festschrift für Kurt Bergerhof ed. Manfried Dietrich and Oswald Lorentz, Veröffentlichungen zur Kultur und Geschichte des Alten Orients und des Alten Testaments, Bd. 232 (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Verlag Butzon & Bercker Kevelaer, 1993), pp. 1-24, passim. 7 For the following, see W. A. Chaney, The Cult of Kingship in Anglo-Saxon Ungland (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1970), pp. 9,42, 46-7, 50ff., 77, 251. 6

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Aziz AL-AZMEH

Divine capacities were also transferred. God's charismatic energy, genetically a supreme form of pure energy, passed on to humankind by way of the king's person—miht, craeft, maegan, corresponding to the xwarra of Persian gods and kings, often iconographically represented as a rayed nimbus or as a halo, and occasionally as a hand—was christianised as Grace, which is after all a manifestation of pure energy. To the heavenly monarchy of God corresponds the mundane dominion of the king who, like the Christian God and like Woden and his subaltern associates before him, is the possessor, protector, governor and wielder, dispenser, and gift-giver, capacities altogether associated with the term frea, used equally for God and for king. Giftstol was the term used equally for altar and for throne. And while the Church destroyed the sacrificial king in a sacramental sense, they dubbed him Christus Domini, the Lord's Anointed. More complex but conceptually analogous were developments in more central lands during Late Antiquity. The period witnessed a wholesale transference of the powers and prerogatives of the many pagan gods to the unique Christian God and later to his Muslim analogue Allah, and their subsumption within his exclusive preserve in a universe where they became demons or jinn—there was never a denial of the existence of these invisible powers, as any reading of Origen, and after him of Eusebius, Augustine, and other Church Fathers, or of the Koran, would make clear. The irreducibility of the sacred is tidied up in monotheism by gathering up divine functions and energies, hitherto dispersed, and their allocation to one deity, thereby rendering the irreducibility of divinity indivisible, like the indivisibility of royal power. This matter is betokened by the transfer of attributes, epithets and names of energy, majesty, and kingship, from one theological universe to another, such as the Greek translations of the Old Testament, in which Adonai becomes kyrios, a term used for various deities, and Shaddai becomes Pantocrator, and El Elyon becomes theos hjpsistos, a name and celestial attribute habitually applied to Zeus. 8 Similarly, Christ and, after him, Constantine, took over wholesale the discursive and some of the iconographic attributes of Sol Invictus. 9 In an analogous continuity of reference to visible and invisible majesty in transcendence, this theos hypsistos just mentioned became, in the Koran, al-'Aliy, an exclusive epithet of Allah, as did al-'Aziz and many other terms derived from names of particular deities and from the attributes of Ba'al and El in Semitic religions, later being the occasion for philosophical theologies and theophoric names. H. A. Wolfson, Philo (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1948),vol. 1, pp. 12-13. Martin Wallraff, Christus versus Sol. Sonnenverehrung und Christentum in der Spätantike, Jahrbuch für Antike und Christentum Ergänzungsband 32 (Münster: Aschendorfsche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 2001). 8 9

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Quite apart from these rhetorical participations and cultic transferences, it must be stressed that late Roman religions had a pronounced henotheistic streak that with time became fully-fledged monotheism under the twin impact of oecumenical empire and the subordinationist theology of rampant NeoPlatonism. This henotheistic streak, which was clearly evident in imperial Roman notions of kingship, can be usefully comprehended under what is called the Orientalism of the late empire. I hope it will be taken for granted that this Orientalism does not indicate the degeneration and adulteration of things purely Roman, whatever these may have been, but that it indicates rather the growth of Rome into imperial maturity, its de-provincialisation, at a time when the social and geopolitical centre of gravity of the empire, and ultimately the imperial residences and the capital itself, moved eastwards. If origins and influences were to be sought, then these could safely be specified as the adoption under Hellenistic influence, especially that of the Seleucids, of imperial norms deriving ultimately from Achaemenian Persia. This is an influence which was felt quite early: long after the Athenians and the Macedonians and tyrants of Magna Graecia sought to emulate the political arrangements, the architecture, the manners of dress, and the pottery of the Achaemenians, and long after Cyrus had been set up as an exemplary political figure by Xenophon and after both Plato and Aristotle had praised the political arrangements of the Persians—long after these events, late republican Romans came to regard rulers, in the Seleucid manner, as the law animate, as lex animata or nomos empsychos. The term was to remain in use well into the Byzantine empire, exemplified most meaningfully and in complex ways by the imperial lawgivers Theodosius II and Justinian, 10 and the question of whether the Roman Pope, as the canonical lawmaker, should not be above the law was to remain with Latin Christianity well into the High Middle Ages. Rulers of imperial Rome were construed as the mimetic medium of divine virtue and reason; for all his skepticism about the exhibitionist tendencies and postures of Roman sovereigns, Plutarch himself construed the just king as eikon theon, and Philo regarded such a figure, in the person of Moses, as nomos empsychos and as ho orthos logosn—and I quote Philo because his enormous influence was of special pertinence to Roman and early Christian conceptions of monarchy; his idea of cosmocracy and of the divine election of the Jews was transmuted from an idea restricted to a tribal collectivity not much interested in it to an oecumenical and universalist idea of dominion.

J. Harries, Law and Umpire in Late Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 212ff. 11 G. F. Chesnut, The First Christian Historians: Eusebius, Socrates, So^omen, Theodoret; and Evagrius, Théologie Historique, vol. 46 (Paris: Editions Beauchesne, 1977), p. 134ff., 144, 150. 10

Aziz

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AL-AZMEH

It will have been noticed that much of the vocabulary thus used to enunciate kingship is philosophical, and I shall come to this matter presently. Yet there was a magical and mythological substructure to this philosophical elaboration, undertaken by figures such as Diotogenes, Stenidas, and Ecphantus, and in rather more abstract fashion by Themistius and Iamblichus, in terms of the late Neo-Platonic, late Stoic, and Neo-Pythagorean vocabularies which constituted the philosophical pillars of the Hellenistic and Roman worlds. There was a cultic infrastructure connected with the divine philosophical associations of royalty. Let it be remembered that Alexander sacrificed to Marduk in Babylon in his capacity as the last Achaemenian emperor and Apostle of the great deity, and in Egypt to his father Ra', and that he was, on his mother's side, descended from Poseidon and hence from Chronos himself, just as Julius Caesar, who set up for himself an empire-wide cult, hailed from the Iulii, descendants of Romulus, son of Mars, a divine connection so real that some legions of Augustus used missiles which bore the inscription "Divum Iulium," and defeated enemies were sacrificed at the altar of Divus Iulius. Not dissimilarly, the Egyptian Ptolemys were sons and daughters of Horus, and, following Seleucid practice, from the death of Augustus in AD 14 to the burial in 337 of Constantine shortly after his baptism, 36 of 60 Roman emperors were apotheosised, as were many members of their families. That the Emperor Diocletian in the third century was termed dominus et deus is entirely characteristic of this mythological and cultic turn. The cultic aspect is crucial: imperial cults—the aversion to which, as is well known, was the litmus-test for identifying Christians during the various Roman prosecutions—were instituted to render worshipful homage to the idea of universal empire personified by the emperor who, well into Byzantine times, sent a representation of himself or fully expected one to be made available by Roman governors or provincial citizens, a statue and later an icon, to the provinces in order to receive homage to his holy person, and by implication to the universal empire—an instance of civic religion according to Varros's well-known and analytically most serviceable distinction in Roman religions between the mythological, the physical, and the civic. 12 There is a very complex history of this phenomenon, marked by episodic ebbs and flows, an effervescent variety of local forms and changes of taste for the divine among the emperors and the populace of Rome and the provinces, not the least significant of which was whether emperors regarded themselves as divine, after the Egyptian and the Seleucid fashion, or simply as sacred persons apostolically charged by divinity with the affairs of the world, after the manner generally—but not exclusively—prevalent among populations and states of the

12

Augustine De civ. Dei 6.5ff.

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Near East. Whereas Diocletian, for instance, was dubbed dominas et dens, the Emperor Julian, harking back no matter how ambiguously to more classical ideas of res publicaP preferred to declare in his Epistle to the Alexandrians in 362 that the gods, and above all the great Serapis, had judged fit that he should rule the world 14 —and that as a consequence Roman citizens must surrender to him the power that emerges from them, without this implying, as it did to his correspondent Themistius, that the emperor was of divine origin—interestingly enough, the part of Themistius' Second Epistle concerning the divine origin of the king is absent from the Arabic translation of this text by Ibn Zur'a (d. 1056).15 Julian preferred instead a rather more humble, mimetic role with respect to divinity; as shepherd and father of men, a mere icon of divinity 16 —though he on other occasions saw himself as the incarnation of Helios, 17 an ambivalence reflecting the inconsummateness of a process as yet incomplete. And while earlier Pagan thinkers like Celsus had regarded the denial of divine multiplicity to be an act of sedition because it derogated local gods and, by extension, Romanity itself, later times saw emperors setting up particular deities as patrons of themselves and of the empire: Mithras for Diocletian, Serapis and Mithras for Julian, and Sol Invictus, identified with a variety of other deities, for a number of others (including Constantine). Yet beyond this variety, there were elements of unity of direction, a development at once combined and uneven, which characterises the whole expanse of Late Antiquity, an emergent unity which calls up interesting and important questions of periodisation, of delimiting in a complex way a très longue durée of the sort proposed by Jacques Le Goff for the Middle Ages, which I cannot consider at present. Suffice it to say that Late Antiquity "decanted"—the expression is Le Goffs 18 —the various legacies of Antiquity, Greek, Hellenistic, Roman, and Oriental, all of these most intimately and inseparably imbricated, and that, in so doing, tidied up the civilised world of the

F. Dvornik, Early Christian and Byzantine Political Philosophy. Origins and Background (Washington D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, Centre for Byzantine Studies, 1966), p. 73ff. 14 Works of the Emperor Julian, trans. Wilmer Cave Wright, vol. 3 (London and New York: Heinemann and Macmillan,1913), p. 63. 15 J. Croissant, "Un nouveau Discours de Thémistius," Serta Eeondiensia 44 (1930), p. 10. 16 Av. Cameron, The Later Roman Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 131ff. 17 W. J. Malley, Hellenism and Christianity: The Conflict between Hellenic and Christian Wisdom in the Contra Galilaeos of Julian the Apostate and the Contra Julianum of St. Cyril of Alexandria, Analecta Gregoriana, vol. 210, Series Facultatis Theologiae, Sectio B., n. 68 (Rome: Università Gregoriana, 1978), p. 76ff., 203. 18 J. Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory, trans. A. Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 12. 13

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day in terms of the immanent trends, all interrelated, that constituted it: namely, monotheism, absolutism, and universalism. We have available important studies of the conjunction between these three components, monotheism, absolutism, and universalism, most notably the older study of Erik Peterson19 and the recent work of Garth Fowden. 20 Quite apart from any imputation of causality between monotheism and universalism, which Fowden21 has denied with reference to the restricted tribal polities of the Israelites, it is important to signal that the trend towards universalism, syncretistic or homogenising, is evident from the long history of attempts to set up universal empires—first by Cyrus, followed rather inconclusively by Alexander, on to the Romans following the pax A-Ugusti and continuing in claims to universality by the Byzantines and their tributaries and successors (copied in the West by ideas of the Holy Roman Empire and notions of translatio imperii), and reaching perhaps its most stupendous success under the Caliphate, which combined the geopolitical achievement of Cyrus with Constantine's dream of universal monotheism.22 Questions of causality apart, there can be little doubt that the crystallisation and the pervasive accentuation of divine kingship was closely allied to the universalist vocation of empire—what I have called the depro vincialisation of Rome—and that both were to a very large extent premised on a number of allied developments relative to the centralisation of provincial rule, the atrophy of civic structures and of evergetism, and the ethnically and culturally homogenising policies of the empire, most saliently under the Antonines and the Severans. These processes ran parallel, and were always gradual: it is often not sufficiently considered as consequential that Constantine was worshipped in his own lifetime, and addressed as theos in his new capital, or that in the fifth century Theodosius II still set up jlamines to his own cult in the provinces—the cult of the emperor was only brought to an official end under Valentinian 23 — and that overall polytheism and monothe19 Der Monotheismus als politisches "Problem: Ein "Beitrag %ur Geschichte der politischen Theologie im Imperium romanum (Leipzig: Hegner, 1935). 20 Empire to Commonwealth: Consequences of Monotheism in Late Antiquity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). 21 Ibid., p. 71. 22 One scholar only has noted similarities between Byzantine and Muslim notions relative to this and some related questions: A. Vasiliev, "Medieval Ideas of the End of the World: West and East," By^antion 16.2 (1942-43): pp. 462-502; See in general G. Podskalsky, Die Byzantinische Reichsideologie: Die Periodisierung der Weltgeschichte in den vier Grossreichen (Daniel 2 und 7) und dem tausendjährigen Friedensreiche (Apok. 20): Eine motivgeschichtliche Untersuchung (Munich: W. Fink, 1972). 23 See for instance: G. Bowersock, "Polytheism and Monotheism in Arabia and the Three Palestines," Dumbarton Oaks Papers 51 (1997, publ. 1998), p. 4ff.; Cameron, Later Roman Empire, p. 124ff.

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ism had boundaries that were altogether porous, both being elaborated in terms of a subordinationist theology that subjected local deities to a supreme deity, such as Jupiter, Sol, Serapis, or Mithras, local deities being represented by Celsus, for instance, as the provincial governors of the supreme deity. 24 In all, the coherence of the political tradition built around the cult of emperors gradually gave away to a coherence emerging from confessional religions, in such a way that ritual coherence gave way gradually to a textual, scriptural coherence. We should not underestimate the great moment of subordinationism with respect to the Emperor's standing relative to Christ: that he is Christ's figure rather than his reincarnation is a serious matter which requires close anthropological and historical consideration which I cannot initiate at the present moment. The central figure in this development was of course Eusebius, 25 Bishop of Caesarea and Constantine's political theologian, whose thinking on matters that follow was to exercise important influences in both East (on John Chrysostom, among others) and West (on St. Ambrose). 26 Building at once on early patristic, late Neo-Platonic subordinationist metaphysics (corresponding to Varro's "physical" religion), on biblical exegesis and most particularly on Origen's reclamation of Romanity in the context of salvation history (this was later expressed by Augustine in the West, 27 in his conception of Rome as the Second Babylon, thus forming the centrepiece of God's design to conquer the world through her, and transposed by his acolyte Orosius 28 into a veritable theology of history, in a line that continues on to John of Salisbury 29 and to Dante 30 ), and finally on the willingness of the Church Fathers such as John Chrysostom "unblushingly" 31 to place the emperor in the worldly role of God himself, once the empire appeared to have been won for Christianity. The result was the continuous claim on history for Christian typology, in which history "lapped over" 32 into political philosophy, and a conception of the emperor set in an universal and indeed a cosmic hierarchy premised on the transcendent and incommensurable removal of its apex— Christ the Pantocrator and his worldly analogue the Emperor, the earthly Among others: H. Chadwick, "Introduction" to Origen, Contra Celsum (Cambridge: University Press, 1953), p. xviiff.; Fowden, Empire to Commonwealth, p. 51. 25 Among others: T. D. Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), passim; Peterson, Monotheismus, p. 66ff. 26 Peterson, Monotheismus, p. 82ff. 27 St. Augustine De civ. Dei 18.221. 28 Adv. Haer. 3.8, 7.1 and passim. 29 Po/ycraticus 5.1. 30 De Monorchia 1,9f£, 2.4ff. 31 Cameron, Later Reman Empire, p. 137. 32 Chesnut, First Christian Historians, p. 133. 24

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Autocrator—from what lies beneath. Both are equally participants, rhetorically and without regard to the dogmatic distinction between the two, in the common terms of energy and majesty, and both mirror each other in upholding the principle of monarchy: to the one monarch on earth corresponds the one monarch in heaven, an idea that was to be ceaselessly repeated alike by Byzantine and Muslim writers on politics. One medieval Muslim theologian indeed suggested that the best proof for the unicity of God was to be had by analogy with the unicity of worldly kingship. 33 Cosmic and worldly monarchy as the contraries of divine and political polyarchy 34 correspond entirely in this scheme. But this very scheme in its monotheistic inflection renders doctrinally very difficult the identification of imperial monarchy with divinity or the consubstantiality of kingship with divinity. The divinity of Byzantine emperors was attenuated and ritualised,35 being converted into sanctity, and what remains of such divinisation are figures, eikones, figures no less real and absolutist for being virtual: figures of mimesis, of emanation, of typology, and of magical contiguity between emperor and cosmocrator. I have already stated that what remains was rhetorical participation; and if we exclude Neo-Platonic elaborations of the imperial office by Eusebius, most particularly in his Tricennial Orations (esp. part 1), in terms of emanation from the divine logos, we are left only with figuration in which the doctrinally and theologically inexpressible is enunciated: this is figuration which acquires reality by repetition rather than through the theological justification which is barred to it, a figuration whose force derives from the illocutionary energy acquired as language, highly formalised and allusive in instances such as this, is subjected to a diminution in propositional energy which is theologically beyond it. I entirely agree with Gilbert Dagron's statement that, for Oriental Christians, sacerdotal royalty was neither an idea nor a theory, but rather a figure36: the emperor as the ritual figure of Christomimesis, whose sites were iconography, ceremonial, metaphor and political etiquette, which enunciated the rhetorical participation of Christ and of the emperor in the common terms of energy and majesty, yielding a field of magical contiguity and the transference within this field of efficacious grace from God to the emperor. This was expressed in the conferment upon the Basileus of the epithet hiereus All material pertaining to Muslim discourses is derived from A. Al-Azmeh, Muslim Kingship: Power and the Sacred Muslim, Christian, and Pagan Polities (London: I. B. Tauris, 1997). 34 Cf. Eusebius, In Praise of Constantine: A Historical Study and New Translation of Eusebius' Tricennial Orations, trans. H. A. Drake, University of California Publications: Classical Studies, vol. 15 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), p. 87. 35 G. Dagron, Empereur et prêtre: étude sur le "césaropapisme" byzantin (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), p. 150. 36 Ibid., p. 184. 33

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by the Synod of Constantinople in 449 and the Council of Chalcedon in 451, 37 and the application of the qualifier theios to all matters that pertained to the person of the emperor, 38 including his icon, which is after all related to him in very much the same way as he related to God the Son, by figuration and magical participation. 39 Thus the wide range of other qualifiers studied by Otto Treitinger 40 : that the emperor is the like of God "in so far as this possible," that he is an emanation of the Trinity, the Trinity's elect, king in God and in Christ the eternal king. Thus also is the plastic extension of the emperor's mystical—indeed, mystagogic 41 —personality, as frozen in ceremonial postures and mimetic tropes well studied by André Grabar. 42 And thus finally, by plausible magical exaggeration, was the divine unction received by the porphyrogennetoi while still in their mothers' wombs 43 : magical exaggeration, but also a typological variation on the theme of the Immaculate Conception; it must not be forgotten that the kings of France from Clovis onwards were anointed with holy oil contained within a phial delivered to St. Remy by no less a being than the Holy Spirit, and that later the Virgin herself was to deliver holy oil to Thomas à Becket for the anointing of English kings. 44 The imitation of Christ of which I have been speaking was not confined to mysteries, but extended to the very real ecumenical order whose lynch-pin was the Emperor, calling up, again typologically, the hierarchical order by means of which the cosmocrator orders the universe, just as ancient deities imposed order upon primordial chaos. The Emperor establishes and maintains taxiarchia, proper order, ritual and otherwise, in state, society, church and army. 45 This order, as I have suggested, is located in the irreduciA. W. Ziegler, "Die byzantinische Religionspolitik und der sog. Cäsaropapismus," in E. Koschmieder and A. Schmaus, eds., Münchener Beiträge %ur Slavenkunde: Festgabe für Paul Diels (München: Isar Verlag, 1953), pp. 81-97, 93-4. 38 H. Ahrweiler, Uidéologie politique de l'empire byzantin (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1975), p. 141. 39 Among others, St. John of Damascus, Ort the Divine Images: Three Apologies Against Those Who Attack the Divine Images, trans. David Anderson (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1980), passim. 40 Die oströmische Kaiser- und "Reichsidee nach ihre Gestaltung im höfischen Zeremoniell (Jena, 1938; 2nd ed., Darmstadt: Hermann Gentner Verlag, 1956), passim. 41 Ibid., p. 128. 42 UEmpereur dans l'art byzantin; recherches sur l'art officiel de l'empire d'Orient (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1936). 43 Dagron, Empereur etprêtre, p. 61. 44 J. Le Goff, "Introduction" to M. Bloch, Les rois thaumaturges: étude sur le caractère surnaturel attribué à la puissance royale particulièrement en France et en Angleterre, new ed. (Paris: Gallimard, 1983), p. xvii; id., "Aspects religieux et sacrés de la monarchie française du X e au XIIIe siècle," in A. Boureau and C.-S. Ingerflom, eds., IM royauté sacrée dans le monde chrétien (Paris: École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 1992), p. 20. 45 Ahrweiler, Uideologie politique, p. 136ff. 37

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ble difference and generic disparity between God and man as between Emperor and his subjects, premised on a simple structure of subordination and superordination. It is as if subjects were enculturated by the presence of the king who, with his capacity for violence (and violence, as we learn from Augustine most especially, is a primary instrument for the imitation of Christ 46 ), alone remains within the realm of nature and outside the compass of culture which is guaranteed by his presence. Order is conceived after a Neo-Platonic fashion, in which hierarchy is presided over by an imperturbable instance removed from it genetically, in self-referential sacrality, energy in a state of pristine purity, beyond refrain or reciprocity yet regulative of all recall and reciprocity that create culture, marshalled by Christ and Emperor for the greater glory of God. Last but not least, this charter for absolutism, often surreal and hallucinatory, was as I suggested wedded to a theology of history. Typology is not only a discursive device in which allegory moves along the axis of time, but also an intimation of magical participation where the figure conjures up the presence of the type. It was not only deployed to figure Christ, but to figure also the dominion of Christ in the context of a salvation-historical scheme in which imperial Romanity was the universal premise of salvation within historical time. Byzantine as well as western emperors figured not only the timelessness of Christ, but the pre-history and history of his dominions. They were inheritors not only of the pax Augusti, but also of veterotestamental kings, 47 just as the Crusaders too were to see themselves as the true Israelites,48 and as the Church was the legatee and indeed the typological reenactment of Noah's arc—although, as is very well known, conditions differed between Orthodoxy and Latinity on this score. Constantine was a Second David and Augustus, and several later Byzantine emperors were called a Second Constantine—similarly, Constantine's new capital was a Second Rome, and a Third was later to be declared in Moscow. Without going into the vexed question of so-called Caesaropapism, the net result of the differences to which I have just hinted between ecclesiastical arrangements of the Orthodox and Latin churches, was that of the separation in the West of Church and state, which led to the creation of an impuissant theocracy, while in Orthodoxy the unity of church and empire led to the his-

K. F. Morrison, The Mimetic Tradition of'Reform in the West (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), pp. 83-92. 47 Dagron, Empereur etprétre, p. 21 ff. and passim; Le Goff, Saint "Louis, p. 388ff.; J. M. Burns in idem, ed., The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 136ff. 48 Among others, Le Goff, Saint Louis, p. 170. 46

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tory of a somewhat less interesting "war of positions." 49 The continuous assertion of the transcendent status of the emperor was perhaps most acutely expressed when, after the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, the Sultan received the monk Gennadius in audience and granted him the insignia of the patriarchal office, including his staff and pectoral cross 50 — while the Sultan, though styling himself Caesar of the Romans, was not in a position to have himself anointed by the patriarch, and would not have wished to have arrogated to himself the sacerdotal aspect of the Basileus (which was achieved by at least one Crusader king of Constantinople), he was still the instance in political control of the Orthodox church, a fact which led to the emergence of Orthodox autocephaly everywhere. That apart, space permits me to add only that the sacrality of medieval western kings and emperors was rarely formalised and infrequently ritualised, but was rather diffused, with variations over time, in a setting of sacrality which englobed these kings functionally, 51 rather than being determined by their own sacral person, a situation which allowed the popes to have an aggressively profane notion of kingship. And though the basic flaw of the papal theory was that no pope managed to find "an emperor who would accept the subordinate role devised for him," 52 the relationship was managed by piecemeal rapprochements until the central part of the Middle Ages, when as the sacerdotium acquired a decided "imperial appearance," the regnum managed to acquire "a clerical touch." 53 So far, I have said precious little about Islam, and I propose to continue from where I left off with regard to this particular historical experience of monotheistic kingship. I have already said that the Muslim Caliphal regime had consummated the universalist trends of Late Antiquity and was the culmination of its tendential orientation. I have also said that, apart from the historical discussion, I am dwelling upon the enunciative form of what I have repeatedly described as an Elementary Form. Comparatism should by no means be confined to a genetic perspective, although I am nevertheless insisting that there is no crucial generic differentiation between Muslim kingship and forms of sacral kingship that preceded it. The great Franz Cumont once stated that, at the turn of the fourth century, under the Roman Emperor Galerius whose Persianising predilections in matters of state were well-known, "ancient Caesarism founded on the will of 49

Dagron,"Empereuretprêtre, p. 312ff. S. Runciman, The Fall of Constantinople, Canto ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 155ff. 51 M. Boureau, "Un obstacle à la sacralité royale en Occident. Le principe hiérarchique," in Boureau and Ingerflom, eds., 1M royauté sacré, p. 29ff. 52 I. S. Robinson, "Church and Papacy," in Burns, ed., Cambridge History, p. 296. 53 E. Kantorowicz, The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), p. 193; Le Goff, "Introduction" to Bloch, Rois, p. xxii. 50

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the people seemed about to be transformed into a sort of Caliphate." 54 For all its rhetorical flourish, this is a statement of tremendous suggestiveness: it suggests that, polemics aside, a certain conceptual continuum relates the Caliphate as a form of sacral kingship to trends immanent in Late Antiquity which it, in its own way, completed. This is entirely borne out by history, for it is indeed a fact that the regime of the classical caliphate recapitulated and accentuated these trends, forming itself as a specific inflection within them. What was Islam, after all, but a recovery for monotheism of the last remaining reservation of ancient paganism, this being parts of the Arabian peninsula, and most particularly its western part, from whence the ruling dynasties of the Islamic empire originated? Close scrutiny of the emergence of Islam will show that it recapitulated in the new linguistic medium of Arabic, now become a language of a universal high culture, the historical processes I have been describing whereby henotheism, subordinationist theology, and polytheism gave way to a universalist monotheism correlative with empire. And let it not be supposed that, for all its importance, it was the Koran that gave rise to the Muslim empires of the Umayyads of Damascus and the Abbasids of Baghdad: not only because the Koran is by no means the sum-total of the Muslim canon, and because for generating a concept of a polity it is but stony ground, but also because the Koran related to Muslim polities in much the same highly complex way as the Old and New Testaments related to Christian polities: as a quarry of quotations, examples, and exegetical occasions for the elaboration of concepts of public order that do not emerge from the texts, and when they do so, they do so only partially and to a large extent symbolically and genealogically (I use the latter term with reference to Pierre Bourdieu). The Koran was edited during a period which we might call palaeo-Islamic—a period which, I submit, lasted well into the eighth century, giving Muslim monarchs the leeway to toy with traditions in place, sometimes with ingenious playfulness, at a time when they had found themselves suddenly propelled to being masters of most of what mattered in the Late Antique world, from Carcassonne to Tibet, in a period of very rapid transformation, and when the prospect of conquering Constantinople was still very tangible—a fact reflected in the rebuilding of the centre of their capital Damascus in the first half of the eighth century after a manner that resembled, typologically and hopefully, the centre of Constantinople. 55

54

F. Cumont, The Oriental'Religionsin Roman Paganism (New York: Dover Publications, 1956), p. 141. 55 B. F. Flood, The Great Mosque of Damascus. Studies on the Makings of an XJmayyad Visual Culture, Islamic History and Civilization, Studies and Texts, vol. 33 (Leiden: Brill, 2001), passim.

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Very much in the way we saw Orthodox polities displace matters of enunciating that which is doctrinally inadmissible for monotheism to the realm of hyperbole, we find that the relendessly hubristic enunciations on the Caliphate find their proper place in the historical analogies and typologies that we find in historical works, in Belles-Lettres, Fiirstenspiegel, panegyric poetry, administrative manuals, epistolary and testamentary literature, coins, and official documents, and certain theological and philosophical works, no less than in the non-discursive media of ceremonial, architecture, courtly etiquette, emblematics, and caliphal biographies. In all, kingship, by which is meant absolutism on analogy with the exclusive singularity of God in the cosmos and the indivisibility of His sovereignty, is construed as the form of artificial sociality, where the kingCaliph imposes culture, that is to say, order, upon humans, and maintains this cultural order by resort to instruments of nature, by the constant use of force and vigilance; for mankind is congenitally recidivist, always hankering after the war of all against all. This is generally premised on a pessimistic anthropology, perhaps most eloquently expressed in the statement by the last Umayyad caliphal secretary Yahya b. 'Abd al-Hamid al-Katib in the middle of the eighth century, that "evil inheres in men as fire inheres in a flint-stone." Kingship—and prophecy—are the corrective. Like God, kings and prophets stand at the apex of a hierarchy of the Neo-Platonic type, of which they form no part, with respect to which they are transcendent, and with which they have no reciprocity, for without absolute monarchy only chaos is conceivable. This theme of the Caliph as the conceptual demiurge of sociality—of culture—was particularly accentuated in Muslim discourses. The Caliph's transcendence figures as a natural force which acts, by the violent means of nature, upon human nature in order to produce culture, but yet remains beyond this culture as a reserve of untrammeled nature ever producing and maintaining culture: The Caliph is the untamable tamer and the savage domesticator, continuously exercising the corrective primal violence with which chaos was subdued in primeval times, rather more in the mood of the Enuma Elish than that of Greek myths of creation. This is reflected in the caprice of the Caliph and the precariousness of life around him—a caprice and a precariousness which repeat the transcendentally narcissistic amorality of the supreme Koranic and Old Testamental deity. And the caliphs of Baghdad, after the earliest period of their rule, enhanced the illocutionary power of this description by their absence, for they virtually never appeared in public, and remained instead in the fastness of their palaces, from whence they radiated the invisible sacredness and terrible energy of majesty, and within which they instituted palatine ceremonial of consummate elaborateness, splendour and solemnity, visually as grandilo-

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quent as any ceremonial seen in Constantinople, and on occasion in deliberate competition with it—let us not forget the transplantation of many palatine and even bourgeois conventions and manners of dress and sumptuousity from Baghdad to Byzantium. The caliphal presence was often qualified as muqaddas, sacred, and called the Second Ka'ba; the Caliph's face, rarely seen except by his private entourage, was very often qualified as luminous, in line with the light symbolism of Late Antique kingship with its solar associations. The Caliph's palatine compounds were often treated as safe havens for lives and treasures in times of trouble, and Caliph's tombs in Baghdad were often venerated. Other magical and typological motifs abounded plentifully, for the caliphate was also the custodian of holy relics: the chosen ceremonial colour of the 'Abbasid Caliphs, black, supposedly the Prophet's, was the colour ceremonially worn by all public officials, and figured the Caliphate against the grain of their skin, with the difference that certain tissues were reserved for the Caliphs, as was red footwear. When Ibn Fadlan visited the Bulgars at the Volga Bend in the middle of the ninth century to forge an alliance against the Khazars, the Bulgar chief prostrated himself before the black cloak sent him from Baghdad, as did Saladin in Cairo more than three centuries later—just as they would, according to custom, have prostrated themselves before the Caliph's person, and just as the Byzantines would have performed proskynesis before the imperial person and his icon. When in audience, the Caliphs from an uncertain and fairly late date would wear the Prophet Muhammad's Cloak (recently worn by Mullah Omar in Afghanistan—how it might have got to Central Asia I have no way of telling), and had beside them Muhammad's staff and before them the Koranic codex of 'Uthman, the third Caliph in succession to Muhammad—the Prophet's standard only surfaced in the sixteenth century, having been bought by the Ottomans in a Damascus market, and was for the first time displayed during a military campaign in Hungary. Ground on which Caliphs sat was hallowed, and letters received from them were boiled and the revolting liquid drunk, as it brought the drinker the Caliph's baraka, the benign Fortuna he commanded but which, unlike the Roman fortuna augusti, had no cultic structure. Indeed, the pleasure and justice of the Caliph caused prosperity, by magical means quite apart from socio-economic considerations. The Caliphate is therefore an almost primordial office, inscribing itself in a universal history of typology, and this is where political theory and historical theology meet. Adam was, according to the Koran, God's first Caliph (khalifa) on earth—his vicar, aposde, vice-regent, legatee, and successor, if such could be conceived; he was in sum his figure. The Baghdad Caliphs like those before them were God's Caliphs as well as Caliphs of Muhammad, the Seal of the Prophets who inaugurated the last, universal phase in the history

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of the world regarded by Muslims generally as a vast typological drama in which Muhammad recapitulates all previous prophecies and polities and restores them to the original and pristine condition of that primordial religion which is Islam (echoes here of a tradition identified with Origen and Eusebius, but also with Late Antique notions of a Perennial Philosophy). It is in one particular consequence of this double capacity that the distinctiveness of this particular Muslim inflection of monotheistic kingship lies: Caliphs were, first of all, instances of mimesis of the divine in their constitutive and preservative capacities and figures thereof, in the indivisible nature of their sovereignty. They are Caliphs of Muhammad in that they figure, in time, both his universalist historical enterprise and his election, which allows for the transmission of charisma through a dynastic line related to him by blood, so that Muslim Kingship in its Caliphal form represents God at once directly and through the historical mediation of the Muhammadan fact—a fact both of historical theology and of dynastic genealogy. Unlike Byzantium, this is an election—and I remind you here of the foetal unction of porphyrogennetoi-—which does not involve the insinuation of the Holy Spirit into the bodies of unsuspecting women, although the mythological register takes a more ebullient form among the Fatimid Caliphs of Egypt and Syria (tenth to twelfth centuries), who believed members of their dynastic line to have pre-existed the creation of the world, in spectral form in which they persisted until the arrival of the appointed time for their successive personal incarnations as Caliphs, or the Twelver Shi'ites, who supposed that the seed of their individual Imams had been physically extracted from Adam's body by God before time itself. Last but not least—and this, as a totalising historical tendency is the crux of the distinctiveness that I should like to convey, though in many disparate and inarticulated details many of its elements bear comparison with Byzantine kingship—the Caliphs were Muhammad's Caliphs in that they invigilated the application of his new dispensation, his shari'a, which incidentally renders all thought of kings as lex animata inconceivable (except among the Fatimids). Muhammad is a universal historical figure not only because he completed the great universal cycle of prophecy, but because in so doing he at once absorbed and elevated prophetic history to its Adamic and Abrahamic beginnings. I have said that the distinctiveness of the Caliphate within the possible structures of monotheistic kingship resided in the concomitance of both a direct and timeless relationship to God, and a relationship historically mediated through Muhammad, and that with respect to the latter, the Caliph was the guardian in his own time of Muhammad's dispensation. It was this last tendency that was accentuated with time, and most particularly with the ex-

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tinction of the 'Abbasids after seven hundred years of continuous rule of varying power and extent, with the destruction of Baghdad by the Mongols in 1258 and the execution of the last Caliph. This nomocratic trend had existed for a long time among pietistic and legalistic circles which were resistant to the sacral pretentions of the Caliphate. Along with the rise of these circles into prominence as the Muslim priesthood—-and I use the term "priesthood" advisedly, in a sociological and not in a sacramental sense, although Muslim priests are of course also involved in practices of magical healing and mediation between individual and God and indeed of a logocratic sacramentalism, the Word of God being to them the only authentic sacrament—this priesthood acquired a strong institutional consistency from around the twelfth century, when the central lands of Islam were overcome with secular kingship, with so-called sultanism, which granted considerable independence in matters of doctrine, including doctrines of legal order, to this priestly corporation, to this "sodality" in the Weberian sense of the term. One very important result was that the three components of classical Muslim enunciations of kingship diverged: while these had previously been sited as contiguous discourses in the same courtly milieu, they now took over different institutional sites, with the Sultans being given many of the worldly prerogatives of the Caliphate, and several of their metaphorical connections with divinity as well, in a form that was highly attenuated in comparison with what had been the Caliphs': they were shadows of God and preserving energies, but not in general sacred presences. The prerogative of figuring the Prophet and his nomocratic dispensation fell upon the priestly corporation, in countrepart to which the cult of the Prophet itself was royalised from the twelfth century onwards. With the displacement of Caliphal charisma to the priestly corporation and its endowment with the legalistic form of the shari'a came also the displacement of this royalist charisma exclusively to the equally absent figure of the Prophet, wherein resided henceforth the Elementary Form of sacral kingship. And whereas previously the Caliphate was a technical legal distinction within the larger concept of kingship, kingship—sultanism—was now shorn of the mimetic and genealogical prerogatives of the Caliphate. What emerged discursively after this dispersion of royalist charisma was a genre of priestly writing on politics called siyâsa shar'îya, a form of legal and scripturalist writing on politics that came into its own in the thirteenth century, the outstanding European analogue to which is Bossuet's Politique tirée des propres paroles de l'Écriture Sainte some four centuries later. What I outlined just now corresponds more or less to the picture commonly held of Muslim public order and of its Levitical legalism. But this, as I hope to have shown, was a development that required several centuries in

MONOTHEISTIC KINGSHIP

29

order to detach itself from the heritage of Late Antique kingship, and, in the same movement, from sacral kingship itself, now transformed into a heathenish veneration of sheer sultanic power. It is this end-result which is probably most present to your minds today, and it is this fact which might explain why some readers might have found the original picture that I sketched so very unfamiliar. Yet in all cases, a profound continuity persisted, and I can do no better now than quote the great philosopher, theologian and astronomer Nasir al-Din Tusi, advisor to Hulegii during the siege and sack of Baghdad in 1258, speaking of the person who directs the affairs of the world with divine support: "Such a person," he said, "in the terminology of the Ancients, was called Absolute King [al-muta' al-mutlaq\ autokrator\ ... and the Moderns refer to him as the imam ... Plato calls him Regulator of the World \al-mudabbir. oikonomos / hegemon]."56

56

The Nasirean Ethics, trans. G. E. Wickens (London: Allen & Unwin, 1964), p. 192.

31 CARL SCHMITT AND ERIK PETERSON ON THE PROBLEM OF POLITICAL THEOLOGY: A FOOTNOTE TO KANTOROWICZ* Gyo'rgy

Gereby

'We have, by the way, the misfortune to possess a false religion." (Adolf Hitler) 1

INTRODUCTION

"Christ is conqueror, Christ is king, Christ is emperor!" The Gallo-Frankish laudes offer an excellent example of how the political is fused into theology in a liturgical acclamation. 2 The attributes of Christ in this acclamation, "conqueror," "king," to say nothing of the word "emperor" come from the secular political and the legal context. Of course all three expressions can be supported by biblical references, but their co-ordinated list expresses a view different from the one that would have been communicated if other epithets, such as "the Son of Man," "the Lamb of God" or "the Good Shepherd" were mentioned. The deliberate choice of the words implies the intervowenness of secular power with the divine dispensation; and this connection, by its very nature, does not work in one direction only. The formulation of the acclamation expresses an idea that not only allows for the exalting of Christ through the attribution of secular qualities to him, but also, by the spiritualisation of the political concepts resulting from this, inevitably allows for a reciprocal relationship between a divinisation of the political ideas and the politicisation of the theological concepts, ultimately ascribing Christ-like attributes to the earthly rulers.3

* I would like to express my thanks to Jänos Bak for sharing with me some inner secrets of the historians' guild, helping me to understand the importance of Kantorowicz, to Istvin Perczel for his unfailing readiness to discuss and for criticism, to Barbara Nichtweiß for her kind corrections, and to Matthew Suff for correcting my English. 1 According to the memoirs of Speer: see Albert Speer, "Erinnerungen (Frankfurt, 1969), p. 110. Quoted by Hans Blumenberg, Säkularisierung und Selbstbehauptung (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974), p. 174, n. 96. 2 Ernst H. Kantorowicz, Laudes Regiae (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1946), pp. 15-16. 3 See the analysis of christocentric kingship in Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King's Two Bodies. A Study in Mediaeval Political Theolog) (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957), p. 61 ff.

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It is because of the groundbreaking and penetrating analysis of this important historical realm of mutual interactions between the secular and sacred rulership that a conference on medieval kingship and rulership cannot avoid addressing the classic work of Ernst Kantorowicz (1895-1963). As a historian of philosophy, my modest contribution to the study of the historical forms of power, along with its concomitant ideologies, cannot aspire to anything more than addressing a specific issue connected to this great book. In particular, I would like to contribute towards the understanding of certain aspects of a mystifying dimension of Kantorowicz's study from 1957. The issue, which has been puzzling readers ever since, is contained in the enigmatic subtitle: A. Study in Mediaeval Political Theology. The issue of 'political theology' in a historical investigation in the 1950s was far from self-evident. There was—and there still is—a kind of antiphilosophical sentiment prevailing in historiography. The great legal and political historians, such as Gierke, Maitland, or Schramm, who set the tone for the period, were of the opinion that decent historians are to give problems of philosophy, let alone theology, a wide berth—always applying a wide cordon sanitaire. The truth of the events and facts is self-evidently stronger than anything involving the mercurial and, in principle, secondary character of the interpreting subject. The priority of the real (as tangible) over the ideal (as elusive) was considered axiomatic. Even today, nearly half a century after Kantorowicz gained universal acclaim for his book, the issue of political theology has not really made it into the handbooks on mediaeval political theory.4 What to do, then, with the paradox that Kantorowicz uses the ominous term, but does not mention its author, the brilliant constitutional lawyer and legal theoretician Carl Schmitt (1888-1985), who also earned well-deserved notoriety for his pro-Nazi politics, at all?5 What is the meaning of this silence? Is the fact that Kantorowicz uses this intriguing term of any importance? My answer will be a qualified " y e s > " but justifying this claim will require a fairly complex argument. Not as if my point would be entirely new. It has occurred to scholars that Kantorowicz, it can be safely assumed, was not of the type who would use a charged term without deliberation and a point to make. The E.g. J. Canning, A History of Medieval Political Thought, 300-1450 (London: Routledge, 1996). There is only one reference to Kantorowicz, as far as I could ascertain. 5 Schmitt's later personal history was hardly less than a further chapter in the universal history of infamy. He entered the NSDAP in 1933, became Prussian Hofrat under the tutelage of Hermann Goring, and acted as the president of the National Socialist German Lawyers Association (Vereinigung nationalsozialistischer Juristen) until 1937. Schmitt defended the murder of Röhm in 1934 ("Der Führer schützt das Recht"), and the 1935 Nürnberg racial laws ("Die Verfassung der Freiheit"). He fell from grace in 1937, but he never repudiated or made any critique of his earlier views.

4

CARL SCHMITT AND ERIK PETERSON ON POLITICAL THEOLOGY

33

attempt of Alain Boureau,6 however, to identify the influence of Carl Schmitt on Kantorowicz was vigorously censured by Peter Schottler at the FrankfurtPrinceton double conference devoted to the memory of Kantorowicz.7 A similarly negative judgement was also passed by Jean-Philippe Genet, who was of the opinion that "all efforts to impose an ideology on Kantorowicz's book are doomed to distort its meaning." He also mentioned the, in his view failed, attempt to identify a parallel in Carl Schmitt's work. 8 However, Genet himself qualified his own verdict somewhat first by a reference to the "very interesting paper" of Joël Roman,9 who discussed the work of Kantorowicz in the context of the branching debates on political theology, and secondly, by another reference to the then-recently published biography of Erik Peterson by Barbara NichtweiB.10 The name of Peterson is also mentioned in passing in Boureau's book. Boureau tried to substantiate his claim that Kantorowicz was aware of the debate on political theology of the 1930s by identifying two instances in Kantorowicz's articles where one finds clear allusions to the issues related to the problem of political theology. In 1952, Kantorowicz published an article entitled "Deus per naturam, Deus per gratianr. Note on the Political Theology of the Middle Ages." 11 Here Kantorowicz only mentions the term. Somewhat later, however, the same term reoccurs in the "Mysteries of State: An Absolutist Conception and Its Late Medieval Origins" from 1955.12 In this paper Kantorowicz also adds the following explanatory remark: "This expression, much discussed in Germany in the early 1930s..." 13 Having pointed to this sentence, Boureau mentions that the book of Schmitt "was violently denounced Alain Boureau, Kantorowic£ Stories of a Historian, trans. Stephen G. Nichols and Gabrielle M. Spiegel (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), esp. pp. 1 0 3 109. The French original, Kantorowic$ Histoires d'un historien (Paris: Gallimard, 1990), was inaccessible to me. 7 Peter Schöttler, "Ernst H. Kantorowicz in Frankreich," in Robert L. Benson and Johannes Fried, Ernst Kantorowic% Erträge der Doppeltagung Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, ]ohann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt, Frankfurter Historische Abhandlungen, Bd. 39 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1997), esp. pp. 152-56. 8 Jean-Philip Genet, "Kantorowicz and The King's Two Bodies," in Benson and Fried, Ernst Kantorowic^ p. 273. 9 Ibid. Reference to: Joël Roman, "La politique est-elle une théologie sécularisée?" Espirit 13 (July-August 1989): pp. 109-19. 10 Genet, "Kantorowicz," ibid., n. 25. Barbara Nichtweiß, Erik Peterson. Neue Sicht auf heben und Werk, 2nd, revised ed. (Freiburg i. Br., Basel, and Vienna: Herder, 1994). 11 Ernst H. Kantorowicz, "Deus per naturam, Deus per gratiam: Note on the Political Theology of the Middle Ages," Harvard Theological Review 45 (1952). 12 Ernst H. Kantorowicz, "Mysteries of State: An Absolutist Concept and Its Late Medieval Origins," Harvard Theological Review 41 (1955). 13 Quoted by Boureau, Kantorowicç, p. 105. This remark was also quoted by Roman, "La politique," p. 113, n. 8. 6

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GYÖRGY GEREBY

by the theologian Erik Peterson, who sought to defeat the idea by demonstrating the impossibility of a political theology within the confines of Christian doctrine."14 In what follows I would like to add further material to the basically correct intuition of Roman and Boureau: I do think that the context of The King's Two Bodies is the Schmitt-Peterson debate on political theology, although admittedly not in a simple way. First, I would like to call attention to some minor facts which indicate that Erik Peterson (1890-1960) might indeed have been a kind of "missing link" connecting Kantorowicz to the debate. Secondly, I will argue that the subtle conflict between Peterson and Schmitt, which was about very difficult, but highly important theological issues directly connected to contemporary concerns, may have intrigued Kantorowicz enough to arouse his interest in this historical-cum-theoretical issue. This will require a reconstruction of the debate, which may be of some methodological interest. Finally, I will argue that the issues discussed by Schmitt, Peterson and Kantorowicz belong to one and the same intellectual realm, and that the recognition of this fact has farreaching consequences. It is to be noted first that Kantorowicz and Peterson seem to have known each other personally. There is a remark in Barbara NichtweiB's biography of Peterson, saying that Kantorowicz was on "friendly terms" with Peterson.15 NichtweiB does not specify the details of their contact, but they must have known each other in Rome, as Peterson left Germany in 1930 and remained in Italy for the rest of his life. Whatever may be the case with the personal contacts, Kantorowicz does refer four times in his "architectonic" footnotes in The King's Two Bodies to the fundamental and at the same time decidedly anti-Schmittian writings of the theologian and Church historian Erik Peterson.16 The interesting feature Boureau, ibid. Nichtweiß, Erik Peterson, p. 872. In private communication B. Nichtweiß was kind enough to answer my query. She disclosed to me that the source for the information was a discussion with Prof. William H. C. Frend in 1991. It is not known, however, how close Peterson's relation to Kantorowicz was. There are no letters available from Kantorowicz to Peterson, neither does he show up in Peterson's last "Roman diary." She knows about a letter of Peterson to Thomas Michels OSB from 29 July 1948, which includes the following request: "Would it be possible for you to find someone in America, who could send me the Laudes regiae of Kantorowicz?" It is not known whether this request was ever fulfilled. In addition, she pointed to me a reference of Peterson's "Frühkirche, Judentum, Gnosis" from 1959 (p. 302, n. 74), which refers to a paper of Kantorowicz (withouth title) in connection with Ps. 73:13, as Varia Variorum: Festschriftfür K Reinhardt (Münster, Cologne, 1952), p. 192, n. 74. 16 Kantorowicz quotes Peterson's "Christus Imperator" in Theologische Traktate (Munich: Kösel, 1951), pp. 149-64, in The King's Two Bodies on p. 72, n. 68; "Kaiser Augustus im Urteil des antiken Christentums: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der politischen Theologie," Hochland30 14

15

CARL SCHMITT AND ERIK PETERSON ON POLITICAL THEOLOGY

35

of these references is that none of the treatises of Peterson have a direct bearing on Kantorowicz' argument. Peterson's subjects are always strictly theological, and pertaining to a much earlier period, even if—as we will see— he assigns decisive importance to the legal and the political elements. These treatises, however, all belong to the "intense discussions in Germany in the early 1930s" of political theology. More specifically Kantorowicz quotes Peterson's study "Kaiser Augustus im Urteil des antiken Christentums," a study which conspicuously displays a similar subtitle to Kantorowicz's own work, "Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der politischen Theologie" from 1933, and in which, it is to be noted, Peterson speaks about Schmitt in the whole long first paragraph, calling "political theology" a heresy. Then Kantorowicz also mentions "Christus als Imperator" from 1936, which emphasises the eschatological and at the same time immanent significance of the term. Two manifestly theological treatises, which have very little to do directly with Kantorowicz's topic, "Von den Engeln" from 1935 and "Zeuge der Wahrheit" from 1937, are also mentioned in the context of a footnote: "The quasi-political concept of celestial Jerusalem has been made a focal point in the works of Erik Peterson..." 17 Finally, he also refers to the brilliant booklet of Peterson, Der Monotheismus als politisches Problem in his bibliography, of which the earlier "Kaiser Augustus" study forms a part. The importance of this booklet, which no less an authority than Arnaldo Momigliano called "the most remarkable book ever produced on the issue of monotheism as a political problem," 18 lies in the last footnote The concept of 'political theology,' as far as I know, was introduced into the literature by Carl Schmitt, Politische Theologe, Munich, 1922. His former short elucidations were not elaborated systematically. We attempted here to show on a concrete example the theological impossibility of a 'political theology.'19

(1932-1933): pp. 289-99, reprinted recently in Jacob Taubes, ed., Der Fürst dieser Welt. Carl Schmitt und die Folgen, 2nd, revised ed. (Munich, Paderborn, Vienna, Zürich, 1985), pp. 174-80, is quoted by Kantorowicz in the Hochland (a Catholic journal) article form on p. 156, n. 205; "Zeuge der Wahrheit" and "Von den Engeln," in Theologische Traktate, are mentioned on p. 235, n. 126; and finally, Der Monotheismus als politisches Problem (Leipzig: Jacob Hegner, 1935) is listed in the bibliography on p. 527. Kantorowicz is aware of the collected publication of three of the treatises in one volume in the early 1950s: Theologische Traktate (Munich: Kösel, 1951). This volume was republished in the Ausgewählte Schriften, vol. 1., ed. B. Nichtweiß (Würzburg: Echter, 1994). 17 Kantorowicz, The King's Two Bodies, p. 235, n. 126. 18 A. Momigliano, "The Disadvantages of Monotheism for a Universal State," Classical Philology 81 (1986), p. 153. 19 Peterson, Der Monotheismus, p. 158; my translation.

36

GYÖRGY GEREBY

It is very unlikely that Kantorowicz would not have been aware of the import of this famed footnote, which was the keystone to a well-written, closely argued and superbly documented argument. It was the impact of this footnote that prompted Hans Barion (1899-1973) 20 in 1968, while analysing Schmitt's Romischer Katholi^smus alspolitische Form21 for the volume celebrating the eightieth birthday of Schmitt, to the remark that no proper account can be given of "political theology" without facing the "Parthian shot" of Erik Peterson. This vivid metaphor alluded to the fact that Peterson's book was written in 1935, when he had already left Germany, so this book was "shot backwards."22 Barion seems to have had understood correctly how deep the arrow went.23 Apparently this remark provoked Schmitt to write the Politische Theologie II. Die Legende von der Erledigungjeder Politischen Theologie (Political theology II.

20 H. Barion, "Weltgeschichtliche Machtform? Eine Studie zur Politischen Theologie des II. Vatikanischen Konzils," in H. Barion, E.-W. Böckenförde, E. Forsthoff and W. Werner, eds., Epirrhosis. Festgabe für Carl Schmitt, 2 vols. (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1968), here vol. 1, pp. 13-59. See also: "Kirche oder Partei? Der Katholizismus im neuen Reich," 'Europäische 'Revue 9 (1933): pp. 4 0 1 ^ 0 9 , reprinted in H. Barion, Kirche und Kirchenrecht. Gesammelte Aufsätze, ed. E.W. Böckenförde (Paderborn, Munich, Vienna, Zürich: Ferdinand Schönigh, 1984), pp. 4 5 3 61, and "Kirche oder Partei? Römischer Katholizismus und politische Form," in Kirche und Kirchenrecht, pp. 463-508. Hans Barion, the great canon lawyer, who was a NSDAP member and discredited himself by supporting the 1933 Nazi sterilisation bill, was bom in 1899 in Düsseldorf. After two years in the army (1917-1918) he studied history, philosophy and theolog}' in Bonn, and was ordained priest in 1924. The openly German Catholic Barion entered the NSDAP in 1933, together with the fundamental theologian Karl Eschweiler (1886—1936), under the influence of Carl Schmitt. For his support of the 1933 sterilisation law the Congregation of Faith inflicted on him suspensio in divinis. In 1935 the penalty was withdrawn, but in 1937 Cardinal Faulhaber resisted his nomination to the Catholic Theological Faculty of Munich even at the price of the abolition of the faculty (1939). After 1945 Barion lived privately near Bonn. In 1965 Barion publicly withdrew his former views on the totalitarian state, to the extent that they supported the Nazi regime. See S. Schröcker, "Der Fall Barion," in H. Barion, Kirche und Kirchenrecht. Gesammelte Aufsätze, pp. 25-78, and M. Dahlheimer, Carl Schmitt und der deutsche Katholizismus 1888-1936, Veröffentlichungen der Kommission für Zeitgeschichte, Reihe B: Forschungen, Bd. 83 (Paderborn, Munich, Vienna, Zürich: Ferdinand Schönigh, 1998), esp. pp. 219-23 and 368-71. 21 Carl Schmitt, 'Römischer Katholizismus als politische Form (Hellerau, 1923). I have consulted this work in another ed. (Munich: Theatiner Verlag, 1925). 22 "You wound, like Parthians, while you fly / And kill with a retreating eye." Samuel Butler, Hudibras (1678). I analysed the personal element in the Schmitt-Peterson debate in a previous article written in Hungarian: György Gereby, "A pärthus nyillöves. Erik Peterson Carl Schmitt politikai teolögiäjäröl" [The 'Parthian shot'. Erik Peterson on the political theology of Carl Schmitt], in Ivan Zoltän Denes, ed., A s^abadsag ertelme-a% ertelem s^abadsaga [The meaning of liberty-the liberty of the mind] (Budapest: Argumentum, 2003), pp. 201-20. 23 Barion, Kirche und Kirchenrecht, p. 492 (= "Kirche oder Partei" (1965), p. 160).

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The legend of the elimination of any kind of political theology) in which he tried to fend off the arguments of Peterson. 24 In order to see the force of Peterson's argument, however, one has to follow the logical order, and see the gist of Schmitt's original position. T H E POLITICAL THEOLOGY OF CARL SCHMITT

The avowedly Roman Catholic legal theoretician Carl Schmitt is universally credited with having re-introduced the term 'political theology' into modern discourse in 1922, 25 when he became professor of civil law at the University of Bonn. The masterfully succinct statement of Schmitt in the third chapter of his Political Theology. Four Chapters on the Doctrine of Sovereignty,26 declared that "All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development—in which they were transferred from theology to the theory of the state, whereby, for example, the omnipotent God became the omnipotent lawgiver—but also because of their systematic structure." 27 As later Schmitt explicitly said in his Political Theology II, he did not mean to touch upon any theological doctrine or dogma, but wanted to make a scientifically founded theoretical statement, which was also relevant for the history of ideas. 28 It is important to see that Schmitt did not bring back the political theology, or theologia civilis, of the threefold distinction of theology, as if a modernised Varro or pseudo-Plutarch. Varro distinguished between the mythical, or fabulous theology of the poets, the physical or natural theology of the philosophers, and the civil or political theology, which is realised in the laws of the polis or urbs. This political theology takes its origin from the fact that the ancient polis was also a cultic community. Theologia civilis, therefore, belongs to the nomos (as opposed to the logos), and its role is the constitution of the unity 24

Carl Schmitt, Politische Theologie II. Die hegende von der Erledigung jeder"PolitischenTheologie (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1970; repr. 1990). 25 Clearly, Peterson himself credited Schmitt with the introduction of this term in Der Monotheismus, as opposed to, for example, A. Dempf, who credited Peterson with it. See Schmitt, Politische Theologie II, p. 21ff., and Nichtweiß, Erik Peterson, p. 811. 26 Carl Schmitt, Politische Theologie. Vier Kapitel %ur Lehre von der Souveränität, sixth ed. (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1993); Carl Schmitt, PoliticalTheolog). Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Cambridge, MA, and London: The MIT Press, 1985). All quotations come from this translation. 27 Ibid. p. 36. 28 Schmitt, Politische Theologie II, p. 22. Already in his preface to the second edition of the Political Theology in 1933, Schmitt explicidy approves historical research supporting his ideas about the genesis of modern secular politics. It seems to me not entirely unlikely that in this later remark Schmitt is referring to Kantorowicz's book, which does fit very well into Schmitt's programme.

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GYÖRGY GERÉBY

of the public sphere, by the cult of the gods, in the sacrifices and the ceremonies. This institutional or constitutive political theology legitimises the political identity and continuity of a people, a city by the cult of the ancestral gods, the gods of the forefathers. This explains why every city has its own gods, the care of which is a duty of the citizen.29 Schmitt was not interested in this ethnology of theology. In the same way it would be a misunderstanding to read Schmitt as if he were discussing one of the two traditional Christian conceptions of the political role of the Church. Neither does he think in terms of the theological legitimisation of the secular political power, a kind of coming to terms between two political entities, the Church and the secular power. For Schmitt the nineteenth century had abolished the theistic and transcendent ideas altogether. He cannot think of two differently founded entities coming to terms in one realm. A. fortiori Schmitt does not analyse anything like the kind of political action that could follow from a particular theological doctrine (as in the modern case of liberation theology). 30 All these interpretations would miss the point of Schmitt. What Schmitt had in mind was the very different problem of the foundation of modern legal theory. Schmitt's statement declared the structural identity of certain classical theological and legal argumentations. The term "classical" is important, for whenever Schmitt talks about theology, he has early modern Christian theology in mind, with occasional asides on the subject of Graeco-Roman mythology and Hellenistic or mediaeval thought. Schmitt's point is systematic. He realised that "the state is neither the creator, nor the source of the legal order." Therefore the concept of the modern state presupposes the idea of the political.31 The political as the basic structural element, however, has its essence in the distinction between the ally or the friend and the opponent or the foe. 32 The constitutive situation of the political requires a decision to be made between the friend and the foe. The decision establishes, and becomes manifest in the form of the law. Thereby the foundation of the state is the constitutive decision. Decision is opposed to consent or deliberation. Deliberation is the termination of the political. Therefore the fundamental issue is the question of sovereignty, the answer to the question: Quis iudicabit? In this way the very nature of the political legitimates decision-making. 29 The division was an accepted opinion in the Hellenistic period, cf. Ps-Plutarch, Placita philosophorum 874d-911c, ed. J. Mau, Plutarchi moralia, vol. 5.2.1 (Leipzig: Teubner, 1971): 879F9 ff. 30 This division is similar to that of E.-W. Böckenförde, as quoted by Dahlheimer, Carl Schmitt, p. 208. 31 Schmitt, Political Theology, p. 19. 32 See Carl Schmitt, "Der Begriff des Politischen," Archiv für So^almssenschaften und Sozialpolitik 58 (1927): pp. 1-33.

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Therefore, when it comes to the ultimate source of the legal, it is neither truth nor nature, but authority, which is responsible for its establishment, as the important quotation from Hobbes aucoritas non Veritas facit legem indicates for Schmitt. He drew the following conclusion: it has to be a sovereign who makes the law. The establishing or promulgation of the law is the creation of the law, the testing ground of which is the extraordinary situation, the "state of emergency." Accordingly, for Schmitt the fundamental axiom of legal theory is the following: "Sovereign is who decides on the state of exceptionality." The ultimate analysis of sovereignty was conducted in pre-modern theology in the context of the Creation: this is the structure that will be reproduced by modern, secularised legal theory, with the difference that the ultimate decision-maker is an immanent sovereign, who, by his very position, assumes all the relevant attributes of the former transcendent Sovereign. From this it is clear that in its fundamental points the political is structured analogically to theology, especially to monotheism. The decision about the law is analogous to creatio ex nihilo. The lawgiver is analogous to the omnipotent deity. The state of emergency, the exceptional case, corresponds to the concept of the miracle. Schmitt's claim is that the process of secularisation notwithstanding, the conceptual framework of a world even if deprived from the divine, still shows a 'theological' structure. In offering examples for this immanentist theology he will consider Romanticism as the secular version of mysticism, or rather, as a "theology" where the transcendent god is substituted by such secular elements as "humanity," "nation," "the individual" or "development." Schmitt also mentions the example of "sociology" taking over the previous role of "natural law." Enlightening examples can be multiplied, such as the dogma of human rights, which takes over the role of the theological axiom derived from the notion of the unity of humankind (taken from Gen. 1:26). In the same way the idea of Utopia is the secularised version of paradise;33 indeed, likewise, it can be shown that the communist ideal is a secular version of chiliastic eschatology. In these terms political theology can be taken to mean that the political in its essence displays theological structures, grounded in a structural homology of the theological and the political sphere, and thereby constituting an ideological basis for the secular reformulation of the theological. This conception of "political theology" reflects the methodological principle of Schmitt that the metaphysical is the ultimate distillation of the structures of any lasting "historical form" of society.34 He lists As to the fabled lands of innocence exempt from the evils of sinful civilisation, see Shakespeare, The Tempest (esp. Act. II. sc. 1), or Montaigne, On Cannibals, high literary versions of the popular Scblaraffenland or Cockaigne. These two texts (from the possible many) I owe to an amusing lecture of Janos Kelemen. 34 Schmitt, Political Theology, p. 46.

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the examples of the representational idea of pre-modern times, the "sovereign good Lord" of the baroque and the "great watchmaker" of classical deism and, finally, the conception of the divine becoming irrevocably secularised, while retaining a theological architecture for the secular, in the nineteenth century, when the economic and deliberative forces finally prevail. Schmitt quotes his favourite conservative author of the nineteenth century, Donoso Cortes, who claimed that as the epoch of royalism arrives at its end, the only remaining political alternative remains dictatorship. Schmitt's powerful argument, let us not be misled about it, describes human history as a one-way traffic towards total secularisation.35 The fact that he manages to preserve the theological within the secular is quite a coup. At a high price, however: Schmitt has elaborated a "theology" of the secular world, conceiving of politics as of an immanentist theology in its own right. The argument of Schmitt, however, can cut two ways: from the idea that politics is a consequence of the immanentist theology of the secular, immanent political order, it follows that it might not be theology that changes into politics, but rather it has always been politics that forms theology and makes in conform to its own shape. Modern politics may be an heir to theology, but this might only be an instance of theology bluntly displaying its derivation from politics. This is the claim of the recent work of the Egyptologist Jan Assmann: politics determines appropriate religions. Secularisation is, then, nothing more than a particularly manifest form of this relationship.36 This thorough-going employment of immanentist theology explains, for example, the rhetorical element in Schmitt whereby he can apply adjectives such as "theologian," "church father," "priest," and "cleric" to such personalities as Karl Marx, Bakunin, Karl Kautsky, or even Benjamin Constant. 37 T H E CHALLENGE OF ERIK PETERSON

The initial response to Schmitt's introduction of the term "political theology" was moderate. Apart from the Catholic dadaist Hugo Ball 38 and Hans Barion (see above) it was Erik Peterson who reacted, as a worthy opponent, giving a substantial answer to the challenge of Schmitt. But who was Erik Peterson, whose name keeps recurring in the discussions? Erik Adolf Grandjean Peterson, theologian, historian of the early Church and philologist, is little known in mediaevalist circles. He was born in Dahlheimer, Carl Schmitt, p. 211. Jan Assmann, Herrschaft und Heil. Politische Theologie in Altdgypten, Israel und Europa (Munich and Vienna: Carl Hanser, 2000). 37 Dahlheimer, Carl Schmitt, p. 212. 38 H. Ball, "Carl Schmitts Politische Theologie," HochlandlX (1924): pp. 261-86, reprinted in Taubes, ed., Der Fiirst dieser Welt, pp. 100-15. 35 36

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Hamburg, of a Swedish Lutheran father and a Huguenot mother. After studying theology in Strasbourg, Bonn, Gottingen, and Berlin, he wrote his dissertation with Nathanael Bonwetsch: this was then expanded for habitation, and a revised version was published in Gottingen, in the prestigious series Forschungen %ur Religion und Uteratur des A.lten und Neuen Testaments, under the tide Heis Theos. Epigraphische, formgeschichtliche und religionsgeschichtliche Untersuchungen in 1926.39 In this groundbreaking work, which was immediately acclaimed in specialist circles, Peterson followed the history of religion school. Between 1920 and 1924 Peterson taught in Gottingen together with Karl Barth (1886-1968). He was offered the chair of New Testament and Church history in 1924 in Bonn. It was in these years that his gradual separation from Lutheranism became final. On Christmas day 1930 Peterson joined the Roman Catholic Church in Rome. He resigned from his position in Bonn, and thereafter he lived first in Munich, then in Rome, in humiliating poverty. He financed his family as an independent scholar. Finally, Cardinal Mercati secured for him an extraordinarius position in the Papal Academy of Christian Archaeology in 1947. Peterson became full professor only in 1956. He died in 1960 while visiting his hometown, Hamburg.40 Peterson had a complex theological development. Coming from a pietist background he initially sympathised with dialectical theology. In his great book, Heis theos, however, he discovered, on the basis of an immense survey of epigraphical, papyrological, and archaeological materials, that the late antique use of the "one god" formula was not a statement of the conceptual content of a creed (pagan, Jewish or Christian), but a formula of sacred law, which declares the sovereign by the acclamation of allegiance. In this sense the Christian use of the phrase One God was of Jewish background, a constitutive acclamation of the community in the legal sense. The public assent is an acclamation of loyalty to the sovereign of the community. The acclamation is the declaration of the relatedness to God of the people of God, manifesting their mutual belonging together, and thereby constituting the community itself, a special case of the Ancient (pagan) ecclesia. The essence of the acclamation is that it is both religious and political. The great insight of Peterson was that the congregation of the community of Christian believers was in fact a political act, manifested in innumerable expressions of liturgy, doxology,

Erik Peterson, Heis Theos. Epigraphische, formgeschichtliche und religionsgeschichtliche Untersuchungen,, Forschungen zur Religion und Literatur des Alten und Neuen Testaments, NF 24 (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 1926). 40 For details, see Nichtweiß, Erik Peterson. The short biography of Ernst L. Fellechner in: Alfred Schindler, ed., Monotheismus als politisches Problem? Erik Peterson und die Kritik der politischen Theologie, Studien zur evangelischen Ethik, Bd. 14 (Gütersloh : Mohn, 1978), pp. 76-120 is excellent. 39

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litany and hymnography. Already in this book Peterson expressed his interest in the political consequences of the "one (heis)" acclamation and its connection to the idea of monarchy.41 By the time Peterson arrived in Bonn in 1924 he had heard about Schmitt in the Munich circle of Theodor Haecker (1879-1945), where they may even have met in passing.42 In Bonn he quickly became a close friend of Schmitt. They met at least once a week, and Schmitt asked Peterson to become his witness at his second (civil, because uncanonical) marriage.43 In order to understand Peterson's own position, first we have to look at his views on theology, which were about to develop towards his later Catholic stance. In his lecture Was ist Theologie? in 1925 Peterson pointed out, in opposition to Kierkegaard, Barth and Bultmann, that theology differs from mythology in three respects: "that there is revelation, that there is faith, and that there is obedience." 44 Theology is not about possibilities, but about concrete questions and answers. It is not about whether man can talk about God, but how the response to God's revelation should be formulated. In addition, theology, properly speaking, only exists in Christianity, for Christ is the incarnate Logos in whom God spoke. Theology is the concrete manifestation of the fact that the Word of God spoke about God in concrete terms.45 The direct address of God to humanity is manifest in Christ, and therefore in the dogma and the sacraments. A theology which is not essentially determined by dogma is simply literature, says Peterson. Theology, therefore, stands on its own, and acknowledging this is the only way to set theology free from the "humanities," that is, from the overbearing context of history, literary theory, art history or existential philosophy. If the task of theology is not in the care of theologians, whereby Peterson means dogmatic commitment, and not 'the academic theology of the professors,' then it falls victim to various groups and guilds of society. In this latter case in due course there will be a theology of the workers, of the capitalists, of the journalists—and of the theology professors. Peterson did not mention Schmitt directly in his lecture, but it was impossible to miss the warning: there is no special theology of the constitutional lawyers, either. Peterson's interest in political theology—certainly under the influence of Schmitt—is testified by two studies he published on this subject in the Peterson, Heis theos, p. 181: "The problem of how the idea of the single ruler is connected to religious concepts and how the religious has acclamation is applied to the autocracy, would require a special investigation" (my translation). 42 Dahlheimer, Carl Schmitt, p. 539ff. 43 Nichtweiß, Erik Peterson, p. 727 and Dahlheimer, Carl Schmitt, p. 481. 44 Erik Peterson, "Was ist Theologie?" in Theologische Traktate, pp. 3-22. Cf. Nichtweiß, Erik Peterson, p. 591 ff., and Dahlheimer, Carl Schmitt, p. 215. 45 Peterson, ibid., p. 13.

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early 1930s. The first, entitled Gottliche Monarchie (1931)46 followed the concept of monarchy (which is not equated by Peterson with monotheism, as we shall see below) from the famous verse of the Iliad, "it is not well that there should be many masters; one man must be supreme" (2.204), through the pseudo-Aristotelian De mundo and Philo, to the Church Fathers. Following the various fortunes of the concept of "monarchy" he points out, with great insight, how monarchy served in the Hellenistic context to offer metaphysical justification for the Roman Emperors, and how Christian theologians struggled with the appropriation of this idea, while finally the Cappadocian Fathers altogether rejected the idea of a possible analogy between the earthly monarchy and divine sovereignty. The gist of Peterson's argument was that for the emerging Christian theology it soon became clear that divine monarchy cannot be realised politically, for the chief reason that the Christian concept of God is not monarchic. Peterson's chief witnesses for the rejection of divine monarchy were Hippolytus and the Cappadocians. The key text quoted by Peterson was the Third theological oration of Gregory Nazianzen (Or. 29.2.): The opinions about deity which hold pride of place are three in number: anarchy, polyarchy and monarchy. With the first two the children of Greece amused themselves, and may they continue to do so. Anarchy with its lack of a governing principle involves disorder. Polyarchy, with a plurality of such principles, involves faction and hence the absence of a governing principle and this involves disorder again. Both lead to an identical result—lack of order, which, in turn leads to disintegration, disorder being the prelude to disintegration. For us, however, monarchy is the most valuable, but not a monarchy defined by a single person, for unity establishing plurality is selfdiscordant, but the single rule produced by equality of nature, harmony of will, identity of action and the convergence towards their source of what springs from unity—none of which is possible in the case of created nature. 47

Erik Peterson,"Göttliche Monarchie," Theologische Quartalschrift 112 (1931): pp. 537-64. It is interesting that this treatise, which addresses the central issue of Christian political theology is not treated by Dahlheimer in his account of Peterson's criticism of Schmitt. 47 My translation is based on the translation by Lionel Wickham and Frederick Williams in Frederick W. Norris, Faith Gives Fullness to "Reasoning. The Five Theological Orations of Gregory Na%ian%en, Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae (Formerly Philosophia Patrum) Texts and Studies of Early Christian Life and Language 13 (Leiden, New York, Copenhagen, Cologne: E. J. Brill, 1991), pp. 244-45. Norris' commentary is completely unaware of the portent of the chapter, as can be recognised from his nonchalance in accepting the Wickham-Williams paraphrase of anarchy as 'atheism' or monarchy as 'monotheism,' a distinction forcefully pointed out by Peterson. The paraphrase in this way completely dulls the politico-theological aspect of the text. 46

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In this text Gregory makes it clear that the Christian concept of God is neither monarchic, nor polyarchic, nor anarchic. All other opinions about God (namely the monarchic, the polyarchic, and the anarchic) ultimately result in a stasis, a fight or a rebellion. The triadic unity and the transcendent peace of the Trinity, however, have no corresponding example in the created world. This text certainly addresses the core idea of Schmitt, that of the analogy between the secular and the theological. On the principles of Cappadocian theology, Peterson reminds us, this analogy is excluded in principle: "With the development of the orthodox dogma the idea of divine monarchy loses its political-theological character." 48 Peterson's interpretation of this difficult text has been subject to intense scrutiny ever since.49 Carl Schmitt himself played down its importance, deliberately misrepresenting Gregory's argument by making the revolt of the One against itself the central claim of the argument, 50 which was taken over uncritically by Peter Koslowski. 51 But if again, one looks at another text of the Cappadocians, a pericope of Gregory of Nyssa from his treatise against Eunomius, one finds the explicit statement that God is "one and yet not one." 52 The Cappadocian understanding of the Trinity, the unique relationships of which were often described in the special terms of synoikesis and perichoresis in Eastern theology, 53 is conceived as a completely transcendent notion: while this allows for a unitary extraneous action, this unity of action is the result of the peace in God, a result of the perfect love and cohabitation of will and reason among the Three. Consequently, this peace, which is absolutely unique, being totally beyond any possible analogy in the created nature, can only and solely be realised by God when He brings it about at the fulfilment of time, in the sense that "God may be all in all" (1 Cor. 15:28). One objection to Peterson's documentary evidence was that the trinitarian debates were conducted about matters purely theological, leaving the political aspect aside.54 This is not quite true. First, the thrust of the argument can be clearly gathered from another text of Gregory in his fifth Peterson, Der Monotheismus, p. 102. A. Schindler, Monotheismus, pp. 23-75. See esp. Ernst L. Fellechner, "Die drei Kappadozier," ibid., pp. 49-60. 50 Schmitt, Politische Theologie II, p. 116ff. 51 Peter Koslowski, "Politischer Monotheismus oder Trinitätslehre? Zu Möglichkeit und Unmöglichkeit einer christilichen Politischen Theologie," in Taubes, ed., Der Fürst dieser Welt, pp. 2 6 ^ 4 . 52 Gregory of Nyssa, Refutatio confessionis Eunomii 5.14, ed. W. Jaeger, Gregorii Njsseni opera, vol. 2.2 (Leiden: Brill, 1960) = Against Eunomius bk II. ch. 2. Post-Nicean Fathers, Ser. II. vol V. 53 Cf. G. W. H. Lampe, A Patristic Greek Lexicon (Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1961), s.v. 54 Fellechner, "Die drei Kappadozier," p. 54. 48 49

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theological oration, where he addresses the problem of the numerical plurality seemingly involved in the concept of the Trinity. Gregory censures an overrational supporter of the orthodox dogma, who would rather sacrifice the Trinity, to avoid a plurality (which would imply three gods) in order to maintain a misguided concept of divine monarchy. Gregory says that this concession would compromise exactly that which is specifically Christian: "In order to avoid the struggle, embracing monarchy, you betray the godhead." 55 Gregory clearly implies that the specific character of the theology of Christians is the Trinity, which cannot and should not be identified with "monarchy." Considering that Gregory did not speak about "monotheism," a term that was inexistent until the seventeenth century, but monarchy, this text must have had political implications for contemporary readers. Peterson very clearly identified the ideological nature of the Hellenistic theologiapolitike, and that in the sense of Schmitt: the establishing of a parallel between the metaphysical and the political. In the Hellenic context the structure of the metaphysical is monarchic, and therefore the political equivalent in the realm of the oikumene should also be monarchic: that is, in this theologised politics the one emperor corresponded to the one god of the kosmos. This harmonious analogy was disrupted by the orthodox dogma. For Peterson's argument it did not really matter which way the argument went: whether the political inspired a metaphysical construction, or whether the theological impregnated the political idea: any correspondence is precluded in principle. In the ominous year of 1933, Peterson published a second paper, the "Emperor Augustus in the Judgement of Ancient Christianity," also referred to by Kantorowicz.56 This time Peterson mentioned Schmitt by name. He said, quite in tune with Schmitt, that "as to its essence, political theology is not a part of theology, but of political thought. In proportion to the measure the ancient city broke away from her gods, there emerged a need to produce a theory, be it philosophical or theological, which would harmonise with the political activity of the city."57 It is this programme, which he interpreted as an attempt to justify the Empire with theological arguments, especially within the context of the history of salvation, that he set out to analyse.58 According to Peterson, the chief witnesses for such a development were Eusebius of Caesarea, the "court theologian" of Constantine, and Orosius, the fifthcentury Hispanic theologian of history. Eusebius praised Constantine for having provided the necessary peace for the Church by his monarchy. In this Greg. Nyss., Or. theol. 5.17, my translation. Williams (see above, n. 48) translates it otherwise. 56 Peterson, "Kaiser Augustus," pp. 174-80. 57 Ibid., p. 174. 58 See Dahlheimer, Carl Schmitt, p. 216. 55

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sense the Roman Empire fulfilled a providential role. As the Empire brought peace to the warring factions of the national states of the oikumene, it provided the best means for the spread of Christianity, and by its encompassing rule it not only prefigured, but in fact fulfilled the eschatological promise of the universal rule of God. Thereby the religious notion of eschatology was transformed in Eusebius' hand into a political Utopia.59 The universal rule of God and the Roman Empire were moulded into one continuity, brought to the extreme by Orosius. If Augustus, however, had to be Christianised, then, par consequent Christ had to be Romanised.60 Peterson points out the novelty of Eusebius' idea, which said something quite against the previous tradition, exemplified already in Hippolytus (but quite in tune with Origen), who in his commentary on Daniel {Comm. in Dan. 4.9.) rejected the identification of the Roman Empire with the "fourth kingdom strong as iron" in the vision of Daniel (2:40 sqq.). Peterson's chief authority against Eusebius and Orosius was Augustine. The important idea here is that the Empire of Augustus, especially in the sense of the pax augustana, was an illusion. Wars did not cease during Augustus' reign, and nor can the kingdom of God be realised within history. A thoroughly eschatological view of the Church cannot look upon any existing political order as the fulfilment of the promise of the heavenly Jerusalem and the coming kingdom of God. Therefore Augustine cannot accept the view of Ambrose on the Church either. The Church is not an image of the Heavenly Jerusalem, but is in progression from the Old Law towards the Heavenly City. The Church is a transitory anticipation of the "kingdom to come," even if—and this should be stressed—it is in this world, in a public, tangible and historical form: This heavenly City, therefore, is on pilgrimage in this world. She calls out citizens f r o m all nations and so collects a society of aliens, speaking all languages. She takes no account of any difference in customs, laws and institutions, by which earthly peace is achieved and preserved—not that she annuls or abolishes any of those, rather, she maintains them and follows them [...] provided that no hindrance is presented thereby to the religion which teaches that the one supreme and true G o d is to be worshipped. 61 "

It is because of this conception of history that Augustine can reject any implied immanence of the Kingdom of God in the Imperium Komanum. The Roman Empire simply cannot be part of the Christian view of salvation history over and above being an interim step, a means by which God directs the Peterson, "Kaiser Augustus," p. 177. Ibid, p. 179. 61 Augustine, De civitate Dei 19.17, trans, by H. Bettenson in St. Augustine, Concerning the City of God Against the Pagans (London: Penguin, 1972), p. 878. 59

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eschatological fulfilment of history. Eschatology precludes any Utopian understanding of the pax augustana or romana. Not only wars did not cease, but the oikumene is not identical to the secular entity of the Empire either. As a symbolic summary Peterson called attention to a fourth-century text by Gregory of Elvira: "Whoever would want to realise the divine monarchy on earth would be like the Antichrist, for it is he who alone will be the monarch of the whole earth (ipse solus toto orbe monarchiam habiturus est)."62 In 1935 Peterson reworked the two papers into a slim volume, entitled Der Monotheismus als politisches Problem. Ein Beitrag %ur Geschichte der politischen Tbeologie im Imperium Ikomanum, already mentioned above. The argument of the book does not go beyond a summary of the two preceding papers: that the Christian attempt to develop a political theology, similar in its dimensions to the Hellenistic political ideology, was doomed to fail for the very reasons that he has already worked out: the concept of monarchy is contradicted by the notion of the Trinity and the accommodation of the Empire into the history of salvation is failed by the eschatological orientation of the Church. We have seen the argument against constructing a political theology based on a trinitarian concept of God. As to the relation between theology and politics, the possibility of analogy breaks down at the very concept of monotheism. This is why the Monotheismus treatise begins with a methodological warning. Peterson calls attention to the historical fact that the term "monotheism" is of new coinage, but with momentous consequences. 63 The theological meaning of "monotheism" is problematic both from the theological and from the political point of view. In fact, what he is going to prove is that Christianity, in its normative form, is not monotheism. The central concepts of the Incarnation and of the Trinity resist this classification (while it is—obviously—not polytheism either). In his Heis theos Peterson was already aware of this difference, when analysing Late Antique theological materials. He considered Harnack's view about the indistinguishability of pagan monotheism from Christianity to be completely misleading. Xenophanes' single deity and the "great king" of the De mundo, let alone solar henotheism, have nothing to do with the Christian Trinity. Accepting one god is not yet Christianity. 64 On the other hand this theology not only resisted the temptation of justifying the monarchy of the emperor on the basis of theological monarchy, Gregory of Elvira, Tractatus (Ps.) Origenis, ed. Battifol-Wilmart (Paris, 1900), p. 195, 13 as quoted by Peterson, "Göttliche Monarchie," p. 563; Der Monotheismus, p. 70. Cf. Carl Schmitt, Politische Theologie II, p. 46. 63 The neologism is usually attributed to the Cambridge Platonist Henry More (1614—1687). 64 Peterson, Heis theos, p. 251, n. 2. Cf. James 2:19: "Thou believest that there is one God; thou doest well: the devils also believe, and tremble."

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but also the justification of the Empire on the basis of redemption history. The Roman Empire may have had a transitory providential character in serving to provide peace for the birth of the Redeemer, and may have helped the spreading of the Gospel, but it was no political Utopia, let alone the realisation of the Heavenly Jerusalem. Peterson's accomplishment was to show that there is a fundamental incompatibility between the structure of Christian theology and political theology, on two scores: because of the concept of god and because of the role of the secular power in the history of salvation. The radical conclusion of Peterson stated the following: The theologised monarchy had to fail because of the theological dogma of the Trinity, and the pax Augustana, because of Christian eschatology. With this development not only did monotheism as a political problem come to an end, but also Christianity was liberated from the fetters of the imperium Komanum [...]. The peace sought for by the Christian cannot be provided by any emperor, for it is a gift of Him who is above every understanding. 65

In order to understand the full bearing of Peterson's rejection of Schmitt's political theology, one is advised to look at some circumstantial issues which indicate that Peterson was publishing his writings not only because of purely historical interests. Apart from studies on political theology, Peterson published another famous treatise in 1933, Die Kirche aus Juden und Heiden, which argues for the Judaic foundations of Christianity and for a Christian theological acceptance of Judaism, stating that "no power on earth will be able to eradicate (ausrotten) Judaism," as the role of Judaism is essential for Christian eschatology.66 Again, even Schmitt noted the curious reference to the Fiihrer in the Monotheismus tractate, in the context of an argument rejecting the view that secular monarchy could have theological justification.67 And there was indeed more to the treatise than a historical argument. First, there are some strange references in the footnotes, the bearings of which are not immediately clear to the reader. It was Jacob Taubes, someone who, like Walter Benjamin, had a love-hate relationship with Carl Schmitt, who found a key to the meaning of that footnote of Peterson which is about the relationship of Cicero to Augustus. Taubes realised the importance of the date of the publication. In 1935 Carl Schmitt was already living in Berlin, presiding at the National Socialist German Lawyers' Association as the protégé of Hermann Goring. It was in these years that Schmitt defended the murder Peterson, Der Monotheismus, p. 59; Philip. 4:7: "And the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus." 66 Erik Peterson, Die Kirche aus Juden und Heiden. Drei Vorlesungen (Salzburg, 1933) = Erik Peterson, Theologische Traktate in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Nichtweiß, Vol. 1 (Würzburg: Echter, 1994), p. 155. 67 Ibid., p. 52. Cf. Carl Schmitt, Politische Theologie II, p. 16. 65

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of Röhm (Der Fuehrer schützt das Recht [The Führer protects the law], 1934) and the racial laws of Nürnberg (Die Verfassung der Freiheit [The constitution of freedom], 1935). Taubes noted that it is against this background that a reference in Peterson to Chapter 30 of the third book of De Civitate Dei becomes meaningful. 68 The footnote seemingly supports the claim that the pax augustana is an illusion—there were wars, and what is more, civil wars, under Augustus himself. Here Augustine clearly takes sides against the imperial theologians, such as Eusebius of Caesarea and Orosius. This young Caesar (Augustus) received the support of Cicero, who wanted to foster his power in opposition to Antony, hoping that [...] his hero would restore the liberty of the Republic. In this he showed himself quite blind and unforeseeing, for that same young man whose position and power Cicero supported, handed over his supporter to Antony's murdering hands, (tr. H. Bettenson) In a letter to Schmitt Taubes said: "This reference to Civitas Dei (sic) III.31 is truly admirable. It has no 'historical sense' whatsoever, while it was acutely topical in 1935: caecus atque improvidus futurorum sent a coded message to you, which never reached you." The last, desperate arrow of a leaving friend was true to their spiritual and scholarly relationship. Taubes saw, correcdy in my view, that Der Monotheismus was the dear wound of a friend's arrow. Taubes understood Peterson much better than did Schmitt blinded by his vanity. Taubes adds the scriptural proof: "faithful are the wounds of a friend" (Prov. 27:6). Again, Peterson fixed a text from Augustine as the motto for the first edition of the Monotheismus treatise: "Arrogance has a certain appetite for unity and omnipotence, but only in the realm of nature, which all pass away like shadows." 69 A closer look at the footnote reveals that it carries again a message over and above its face value. In the previous lines to the quote the discerning reader can detect the following hint: "What else is coveted by man by means of it (viz. the empty ostentation of the world), but to become the only one, if it would be possible, to whom all the others are subjected, in a perverse imitation of God? To Whom if one would submit oneself, living according to His precepts, by Him all the rest would be subjected to him, and then one would never be deformed to the extent that one would ever heed a litde beast, who wants to rule the people." 70 In 1935 this text does not require much explanaJ. Taubes, Ad Carl Schmitt. Gegenstrebige Fügung (Berlin: Merve Verlag, 1987), p. 40. Augustine, De vera relig. 45.84: Habet ergo superbia quendam appetitum unitatis et omnipotentiae, sed in rerum naturalium prindpatu, quae omnia transeunt sicut umbra. 70 Ibid.: Quid enim aliud in ea homo appetit, nisi solus esse, sifieripossit, cui cuncta subjecta sint, perversa scilicet imitatione omnipotentis Dei? Quem si subditus imitaretur, secundum praecepta ejus vivendo, per eum 68

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tion. The heeding of the little beast is a consequence of the secular imitation of divine monarchy based on the idea of an illicit analogy. In my understanding, therefore, the Monotheismus treatise had a double agenda. It addressed a problem systematically in a historical guise: the issue of Christian political theology. But it was specifically addressed to Carl Schmitt, the former friend, in a prophetic way. It is an intriguing fact that the second edition of the treatise was published without this motto (in 1951). What is the peculiarity of Peterson's criticism? It has been observed that while Peterson rejects the possibility of political theology, he in fact relied on theology not only in refuting Schmitt, but in articulating the theological basis of a spiritual resistance to the then-prevalent political dangers. One should not construct from this a self-referential, and thereby self-refuting argument, as did, for example, Koslowski. To argue that rejecting political theology would result in another form of political theology entirely misses the point of consistency in Peterson's theoretical views and political actions. What Peterson denied was not the possibility of the public representation of Christianity, as if he would stand up for a separation of the "two realms," those of the secular and the sacred. That would have been entirely in opposition to the way in which he conceived of the Church as a visibly public and social entity. The theological point in which Peterson opposed Schmitt's views was that the public representation of the eschatological kingdom of God requires the rejection of any and every attempt to identify this kingdom with a secular empire. No political Utopia can masquerade as the heavenly Jerusalem, unless it be the final Utopia of the Antichrist. It is another intriguing fact that it was precisely in this period that Peterson wrote his seminal study on the Christian martyrs. 71 It is to be noted that Peterson made a theological point. He did not belong to the leftist critics of Nazism. A most unlikely opponent as he was, he came from a similar anti-liberal direction to that of Schmitt himself. Peterson did reject the idea of religion as a private issue, withdrawing from the public sphere in the face of the dominance of the secular, exemplified in the tyranny of "economic thought." For him the Church and dogma were not the concern of the private individual: it was necessarily a public form, requiring a public presence of the Church, a necessity originating from its representative function, testifying to the Incarnation and to the promise that "God may be all in all" (ICor. 15:28), also manifested in the acclamatory actions of the people of God, that is, in giving testimony in the form of the eschatological cult of the Church. haberet subdita caetera, nec ad tantum deformitatem vetiiret, ut bestiolam timeret, qui vult hominibus imperare. My translation, emphasis added. 71 Erik Peterson, Zeuge der Wahrheit (Leipzig: Jacob Hegner, 1937).

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What did Peterson accomplish? To Schmitt he opposed a historical context, the period of Late Antiquity, when Christianity first faced the challenge of political theology. By means of historical examples from the fourth and fifth centuries he managed to show that a representative mainstream current in Christian theology in principle excluded the possibility of offering an analogy for the secular order, which would thereby allow to use that analogy as a pretext for sanctifying itself by reference to the then new theology of the Church Universal. ERNST KANTOROWICZ

Let us turn back to Kantorowicz now. It is a widely accepted view that the characteristic prerogative of the modern period is that it does not require legitimation by reference to anything theological. The chasm between the modern and the pre-modern is explained accordingly. Ancient and mediaeval societies, so the contention goes, adopted a way of thinking in which the political was glued to a theological foundation. In opposition to that the modern period is characterised by a complete disregard of the Church's claim for the right to participate in the formation of temporal power. This is usually called the "separation of Church and State," with no need for a foundation in theology for political action. Modern politics is a lay enterprise, and it can get by, and is more than ready to do so, without any reference to God (thus, the return of the "theistic" argument to politics is called "fundamentalism"). Modern society is defined just by this differential characteristic. In modern society religion is relegated, or rather confined, to an enclosed sphere, that of the intimate and the private. The establishing of this clear-cut chasm, however, opens up another question, which addresses the converse problem. If there is such a difference, how could that society give birth to the modern world? Was this change really that abrupt, and does it thereby remain an unexplainable mystery, or can we detect implicit forces that were already harbouring such elements, the coming of age of which provided the missing link of continuity between these epochs? Is there such a great difference in the structure of legitimation? 72 Taking the difference as something given both mystifies the origins and leaves the transition unexplained, to say nothing of the fact that it breaks up the continuity and unity of human history. The idea of a "paradigm shift" would be a handy conceptual way out, but it would leave the problem unexplained.

This is the point contested by H. Blumenberg in Die Legitimität der Neuheit, but this is not the place to enter into this debate.

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Schmitt's incisive theory of "political theology" answers the problem. He points out the continuity in structure, the content of which might change over the course of subtle transformations. The important issue is that the political retains the basic structure of decision, sovereignty, the friend-foe distinction and the omnipotence of the lawgiver. It is well pointed out by Kodalle that for the Schmittian type of political theology it is in principle indifferent to know what emerges as ultimate at the end, that is, what will be chosen and believed in political theology. "Only that something is believed or chosen, that there is a content in the process of making something absolute, that is functionally necessary."73 In the light of this problem the choice of subject in Kantorowicz's great book is not artless. He starts out with the theories of Tudor lawyers and strange legal theories of even later periods, and then moves to the mediaeval and, more importantly, theological origins of these concepts, in order to show finally the gradual transition in the form of a great glissando from the mediaeval school of theological thought to secular modern political ideas. Kantorowicz shows the process of the "drifting" 74 of concepts from the mediaeval political application of the theological (that is, for example, legitimising the Frankish emperors through sanctifying them with the help of Christological concepts) to the political appropriation of originally theological concepts (that is, legitimising legal and political ideas by dressing them in the sacral aura implied by the use of theological concepts, while stripping them of their original theological context). The passing from the originally eucharistie concept of the corpus mysticum first to the corpus ecclesiae mysticum, and then to the corpus reipublicae mysticum (and we may add, in the spirit of Schmitt, to the corpus nationis mysticum during the Romantic period), ran parallel with a very large number of similar processes: the identification of the Pope with the Church as parallel to the identification of the ruler with its reign,75 the sacramental, purgative character of the assumption of the office of the "body politic,"76 and indeed, the very idea of the "twin person" of the king developed according to the analogy of the Chalcedonian Christological dogma, 77 the "halo of perpetuity," that is, the eternity of God serving as a model for "la France éternelle,"78 or other arcana of the state around as late as 1700, such as the ministerium taking the place of mysterium, the fiscus that of Christus, and ju73 K.-M. Kodalle, Politik als Macht und Mythos. Carl Schmitt's Politische Theologie (Stuttgart, Berlin, Köln, Mainz: W. Kohlhammer, 1973.), p. 93. Quoted by Dahlheimer, Carl Schmitt, p. 212. 74 Kantorowicz, The King's Two Bodies, p. 506. 75 Ibid., p. 4. 76 Ibid, p. 11. 77 Ibid, p. 17. 78 Ibid, p. 79, but see the whole argument from p. 78.

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rists the office of the priests.79 In the last chapter Kantorowicz shows how in Dante the secularisation of virtues helps the secularisation of paradise. As Kantorowicz traces the historical problem posed by the "king's two bodies"—the body politic and the body natural—back to the Middle Ages (and earlier), and explores the theoretical, symbolic and artistic traces of how the early modern Western monarchies gradually began to develop their characteristic 'political theology,' an indispensable preparatory step for modern developments, what he shows is an exhaustive proof for the final verdict: " . . . the king's two bodies is an offshoot of Christian theological thought and consequently stands as a landmark of Christian political theology." 80 If the above analysis of the thrust of Kantorowicz's argument is correct, then he can be taken to have developed a position in the debate on political theology. To paraphrase Schmitt, what Kantorowicz showed was that all significant concepts of the early modern theory of the state are secularised mediaeval theological concepts. But we have to be very careful with the further implication of this seeming justification of Schmitt. What Kantorowicz really wants to do, in my view, by providing this massive amount of proof, is not to offer an unqualified support of Schmitt. What he seems to imply is that the structures, which remain the same while changing their content, are the heritage of Christian political theology. And, in tying Christianity by its necessary consequences to the emergence of the modern absolutist state, and then (implicitly) to all later European developments, then the gist of this wonderful collection of fascinating mediaeval antiques amounts to one gigantic historical modus fallens: if the natural trend of the historical developments of Christian theological concepts lead to thoroughly secularised doctrines clad in the legitimising garb of the antecedent theological doctrines and transforming the sacred character of the visible Church into the sacralisation of the ruler and then finally to the immortalisation of the nation,81 then the concomitant disasters retroactively discredit the theological ideas themselves. Following the historical transformations, the early modern concepts are in fact proven to be consequences of the theological doctrines. An upshot of Kantorowicz's argument is that political theology exists even on the basis of the Christian doctrine. This formidable conclusion is not spelt out in Kantorowicz's book in any explicit sense. However, if we follow the hints that he clearly made, then against the above background the significance of Kantorowicz's research can, I hope, be better appreciated. Kantorowicz, Mysteries of State, p. 38. Kantorowicz, The King's Two Bodies, p. 506. 81 Cf. Kantorowicz's analysis of the change from the principle ecclesia nunquam moritur (ibid., p. 292) t o p o p u l u s non moritur (ibid., p. 295ff., 303ff.). 79

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This might explain why he did not refer to Schmitt then. I do not think that the omission was an instance of the widespread opinion of German historians that there is nulla quaestio de philosophis. This is not at all convincing in his case, even if it could have been understandable for a historian of lesser stature to remain silent in matters of legal theory or theology. Kantorowicz's personality, as one can gather from his background in the Stefan George circle, or from his proudly anti-academic Frederick the Second, is not a likely candidate for such self-constraint. I would rather take this to be a case of damnatio memoriae, quite in tune with the repudiation of his own pre-war work and his association with the Deutscber Geist in the light of the catastrophic historical developments he had to experience. Kantorowicz stepped into the debate with the methods of the mediaeval historian, and this is, in my opinion, sufficiently indicated by the references to Peterson, whom he ought not have mentioned at all. Peterson, with whom his personal sympathies must have lain, was deeply engaged in this debate at the time. The legal historian must have understood, however, the problem of Schmitt, too. The question remains: whose side was he on? CONCLUSIONS: A DEBATE ON SECULARISATION AND THE MEANING OF HISTORY

I hope to have shown the unfolding of a great debate, which was as much about purely scientific questions as it was about the meaning of history. The three authors discussed were related to each other and acted in the intellectual atmosphere of the same Weimar Germany. Their writings were all born out of that feverish period of German intellectual history, and thereby their subtle and often clandestine debate has to be reconstructed as a whole, or rather as a drama in the history of scholarship. As the course of the debate shows, their intellectual conflict was really about the understanding of modern developments, disguised in arcane historical arguments—the use of history also serves as an integumentum, as Carolingian theologians would call it, to hide and also to reveal contemporary interests. Carl Schmitt identified a metaphysical substructure remaining constant during the changes of the great "historical forms" of human society. Ernst Kantorowicz showed that the fundamental concepts of the modern state were born out of the secularisation process of Christian theological ideas. Erik Peterson, on the other hand, tried to show, through the normative example of Cappadocian theology, which was to become the orthodox Christian doctrine, not only that this theology can not be turned into 'political theology,' but also that it can never degenerate into secular concepts. Peterson's hidden assumption is, of course, that the orthodox meaning of the Christian concepts is retained.

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The thesis of Peterson has also been subject to scrutiny ever since by historians, theologians and philosophers.82 Schmitt, in his answer in 1969 dismissed Peterson's criticism as a version of the "two cities" doctrine of Augustine on a Church and an Empire entirely separate from each other, as if Peterson would want to say that the blending of theology with politics results in something unclean.83 This easyhanded dismissal smacks of carelessness if not of outright and deliberate misrepresentation.84 Peterson interpreted the meaning of theology, liturgy and especially the "soldiering" of martyrs under the command of Christ (this was first worked out in the "Christus Imperator," then in the "Zeuge der Wahrheit") not as a withdrawal from the world, but as a thoroughly public action. The Church for Peterson lives and acts in history, but her guiding principle is founded on her representative character of the eschatological. In particular, there is something mean in the objection of the old Schmitt when he ridicules Peterson by suggesting that he wanted to separate theology from politics precisely in the moment when they would have needed such a suggestion most: that is, in 1935 in the face of the Hitler regime. Patristic scholars pointed out that it was not only Arians who defended the monarchy, but also trinitarian theologians. There can also be found examples of attempts at the "instrumentalisation" of the Trinity, to be sure.85 However, in my view, this argument misses the essential point and thereby becomes a version of the fallacy of ignoratio elenchi. Sporadic attempts at electing three emperors to reflect the Trinity in which the soldiers of the Byzantine thema believed only play into the hands of Peterson. There can be failed attempts at something impossible. But precisely the fact that a "trinitarian" emperor-group could never become a relevant political institution, a proper "historical formation" (geschichtliche Grosse), proves the point of the Cappadocians. As to the other issue, closer scrutiny reveals that the politics of the orthodox patriarchs and bishops do not contradict Peterson's point. One A. Schindler, ed., Monotheismus. There is no room here to detail of the most interesting debates with Peterson, that of the sympathetic Momigliano, "Disadvantages of Monotheism" (see above, n. 18) repr. in his On pagans, Jews and Christians (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1987), pp. 142-58. 83 Schmitt, Politische Theologie II, p. 20; Dahlheimer, Carl Schmitt, p. 219; and Jan Assmann, Herrschaft und Heil. Politische Theologie in Altägypten, Israel und Europa (Munich and Vienna: Carl Hanser, 2000), p. 22ff. 84 See proofs for this in Nichtweiß, Erik Peterson, p. 818: "Wenn man Carl Schmitt nicht eine bewusste Irreführung unerstellen will, sieht man sich fast zu der Annahme gezwungen, dass er Peterson trotz der persönlichen Treffen und Gespräche bis zum Dezember 1936, des brieflichen Austausches und der offenbar doch eingehenden Lek[t]üre seiner Werke—er soll die "Theologische Traktate" sogar "auswendig" gekannt haben—im Wesentlichen missverstanden hätte." 85 Fellechner, "Die drei Kappadozier," in Schindler, ed., Monotheismus, p. 58. 82

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interesting point can be mentioned here, though. The idea of the ecumenical council relies on the Gospel words "For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them" (Mt. 18:20), which refers back to the commandment for "two or three witnesses" required for a sentence (Deut. 17:6). This comes closest to a theologically sanctioned political entity on earth.86 An argument in favour of Peterson's understanding of the role of the Church can be gathered precisely from the idea of "historical formation." If a social or institutional character persists over time, recurring in conflicts and institutional struggles again and again, then that manifests a lasting, "encoded" characteristic. If the theological ideas institutionalised in the Church result in a lasting struggle between the secular and the sacred institution, as they were indeed found to be in constant struggle during the Latin Middle Ages, how is this conflict to be explained? What kind of legitimation could the Church call upon to resist the pretenses of the Empire? Why was there a need for compromise at all? The answer of Peterson addresses this problem by assuming that eschatological orientation is a defining feature of the Christian Church. The Church always represents the future eschaton in the present. In the famous Gospel line, "My kingdom is not of this world" (Jh. 18:36), Christ did not speak about some chiliastic expectations. The fulfillment of the world is that final event which happens in the city of God, in the heavenly Jerusalem. Therefore the Church must resist every other political power which would consider itself as the fulfillment of the time, as an end of history. As long as the second coming of Christ has not happened and the heavenly Jerusalem has not descended to earth, the Church always has to testify to this in representing this eschatological directedness in her celebrating temporal instances of the One Liturgy and in the sacraments, until the history of salvation reaches its end. In principle, every kind of chiliastic theology, or secular or sacred myth falls short of this character. Peterson quotes Philip. 4:7: "And the peace of God, which surpasseth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus," 87 implying that the trinitarian peace of the orthodox dogma is an expectation to be represented. We have seen that Peterson's favourite authority in his understanding of the Church is Augustine, who is probably the strongest opponent of any identification of eschatology with some existing political order or Utopia. "So, then, he only who gives true happiness gives eternal life, that is, an endlessly happy life. And since those gods whom this political theology (theologia civilis) worships have been proved to be unable to give this happiness, they ought 86 87

I owe this interesting point to Istvan Perczel. Peterson, DerMonotheismus, p. 105.

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not to be worshipped on account of those temporal and terrestrial things [...] much less on account of eternal life, which is to be after death." 88 The view formulated by Augustine was dominant for the early period of Christianity. On the level of ideas, the formulation was clear. The Christian way of life amidst the transitory world is the subject of chapters 5 and 6 of the Letter to Diognetus-. They do not inhabit cities of their own. [...] They live in cities, be they Hellenic or Barbaric, as it is their lot. [...] They live in their own cities, but as though they were only passing through. They play their full role as citi2ens, but labour under all the disabilities of aliens. Any country can be their homeland, but every homeland is a foreign country. [...] They pass their days upon earth, but they are citizens of heaven. Obedient to the laws, they yet live on a level that transcends the law.89 The lack of a secular homeland is present in the formula "For here we have no lasting city, but we seek the city which is to come." 90 A political consequence of this principle can be found in the Acts of the Scyllitan Martyrs, where Speratos, the speaker for the Christians, explicitly declares that "I do not recognise the kingdom of this world, but praise and worship my god, whom no one has ever seen." 91 In this conception of the Church, Peterson and Augustine stand in deep affinity with Walter Benjamin's (1892-1940) understanding of the mesFragment. sianic kingdom. Benjamin says the following in his Theological-Political Only the Messiah himself consummates all history, in the sense that he alone redeems, completes, creates its relation to the Messianic. For this reason nothing historical can relate itself on its own account to anything Messianic. Therefore the Kingdom of God is not the telos of the historical dynamic: it cannot be set as a goal. From the standpoint of history it is not the goal but the end. Therefore the order of the profane cannot be built up on the idea of the Divine Kingdom, and therefore theocracy has no political, but only a religious meaning.92 The end of history is not a part of history, not something within the historical order. The last event is not like any other event preceding it. It is not the last of the ordinary historical events, but something which consumAugustine, De àvitate Dei 6.12; trans. H. Bettenson, p. 253. Ep. ad Diognetum 5.2-6; my translation. 90 Heb. 13:14. 91 Acta Sdllitanorum martyrum sive Passio Sperati et sociorum, ed. J. A. Robinson, The Passion of S. Perpetua. Texts and Studies 1.2, Appendix (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1891; repr. Nendeln, Liechtenstein: Kraus, 1967), p. 113, 22. 92 English translation by Jürgen Braungardt as available at http: / / www.braungardt.com/Philosophy/Benjamin/theological%20Fragment.htm. 88 89

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mates history as such. Benjamin's argument reflects concern across historical periods, and it serves to make Peterson's point somewhat more readily comprehensible. The Jewish philosopher and the Christian theologian display a remarkable parallelism in formulating a basic tenet of biblical ideas. This quote from Benjamin prompts me to make a remark on a weakness in Peterson's original argument. In his conclusion to Der Monotheismus Peterson says that "something like 'political theology' is only possible on the basis of Judaism and paganism." 93 It is not the place here to explore the issue further, but quite in tune with the reasoning of Peterson he could have said that the Old Testament concept of the Jewish kingdom very explicidy resists the 'monotheistic' temptation, too. In 1 Sam. 9 the establishment of the kingdom for the Jews is demanded on the basis of analogy to the gentile nations, and against the will of God. God allows the Jews to elect a king, but this is a choice of the elect nation, and is granted by God as an allowance, and has nothing to do with any kind of metaphysical analogy. This corrective does not affect the outcome of the argument. No purely secular order can be justified by reference either to Jewish or to Christian theology. It does not mean that theology does not justify secular order. Just the opposite: every order ought to be taken as being under divine dispensation, as no part of history is exempt from the presence of a secular order. But the fact that secular power has some place in the divine dispensation (as in the theology of the Epistle to the Romans, etc.), that is, plays an assigned role in salvation history, does not imply the fulfilment of times. What this theological argument amounts to, to be sure, is that it does not justify secular power by making it legitimate with reference to some analogy of being, that is, by the analogy of the overall order of the cosmos, as if not being justified by this metaphysical order it would be unnatural and would have to perish. It is true that, for. example, Thomas Aquinas, and many other theologians in the course of history used this fundamentally Hellenistic, that is, non-Christian, argument in developing their points. 94 But to this Peterson Peterson, Der Monotheismus, pp. 99-100 = TT 59. Peterson, in a letter to Karl Barth, summarises his conclusions in a different way: "I say there that with the 'triune god' one cannot develop a political theology, but that it is possible with 'monotheism' and 'polytheism'" (NichtweiB, Erik Peterson, p. 776). 94 Cf. Thomas Aquinas STh 1.103.3c: "We must of necessity say that the world is governed by one. For since the end of the government of the world is that which is essentially good, which is the greatest good; the government of the world must be the best kind of government. Now the best government is the government by one. [...] All things desire good, so do they desire unity; [...] Therefore the intention of a ruler over a multitude is unity, or peace. [...] It is clear that several cannot be the cause of unity or concord, except so far as they are united. Furthermore, what is one in itself is a more apt and a better cause of unity than sev93

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(or the Cappadocians) would have answered in the same vein as he answered Schmitt: it is not the analogy that is the reason, for there cannot be an analogy at all. Is then Thomas Aquinas not orthodox enough for Peterson? Here we arrive at a delicate point. It may be recalled that the argument of Kantorowicz was that if the theological ideas are such and such then they imply the following kind of secularised concepts. But what if the theological ideas are already flawed in some fundamental sense? Here we would have to look at the theological foundations of Western Christianity: we can discover, (indeed, it is almost a commonplace) that while Western theology—in its representative forms—accepted the great formulas of the Cappadocians, it has retained different theological accents. From this point of view some characteristic Western theological positions betray subtle differences. I am not talking about explicit differences in dogmas, but latent, semiconscious preferences in their interpretations. Certainly, for the Cappadocians, who developed their conception of the Trinity during the second phase of the Arian controversy, and which was to become the standard doctrine in the Eastern Church, the Augustinian idea of the vestigia trinitatis, or the Thomistic concept of the analogia entis would have been unacceptable on the grounds seen above. This difference is quite tangible in the vexed problem epitomising Western trinitology: the Augustinian-Boethian theology of the intra-trinitarian relations (which is largely responsible for the filioque doctrine), often attracted the charge, from the side of the Greek theologians, of crypto-Sabellianism. Again, in Christology, there is a subconscious tendency towards extreme Antiochene dyophysitism. Without such tint that we might call virtually Nestorian, it would have been strictly impossible to find an analogy between the two natures of Christ and the two bodies of the king, the key case for Kantorowicz. In terms of a Cyrillian sharpening of the complete union in one hypostasis, but simultaneous identity preserved for the divine and the human natures of Christ, this two-body doctrine would have been utterly counterintuitive. In sum: the political and the strictly orthodox theological can be independent from each other, but not so with unorthodox theologies. This implicit background of Peterson's arguments are indirectly corroborated by the theological revival of Arianism in the 1930s. Koslowski has eral things united. Therefore a multitude is better governed by one than by several. From this it follows that the government of the world, being the best form of government, must be by one. This is expressed by the (Metaph. xii.): 'Things refuse to be ill governed; and multiplicity of authorities is a bad thing, therefore there should be one ruler.'" (Cf. ScG 1.42. n7.) Trans, by the English Dominican Province available at http://www.ccel.org/ccel / aquinas/summa.htm.

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emphasised the point that "the medieval and early modem doctrine of God was more theistic than trinitarian" in the West, also referring to Aquinas' justification of the monarchy. 95 In addition he also calls attention to how among the German Christians Arianism enjoyed a significant revival, and that it was considered as properly German Christianity, secular, nationalistic, preserving the race and the Nordic-German moral. 96 For Peterson, then, "secularisation" is not something irrevocable, as it was for Schmitt. And Peterson has a theological reason for this view. The time after the Incarnation is the final time of history.97 There is no sufficient theological reason to assume any kind of further caesura in this period, like a metaphysically novel period of history, as the "secular modernity" would be on Schmitt's account of historical formations. Peterson's argument, instead of secularisation, relied on the autonomy of the theological, while rejecting its confinement to the sole territory of the divine. For Peterson's understanding there can be no caesura within the last time of history, like "secularisation" or "modernity." No significant event is to be understood between the Incarnation and the end of times. There is free human action, however, and concomitant responsibilities. To explain his position we may refer to the example of the establishment of the Old Testament kingship above. Or one could also look at the famous scene in Gen. 18:16-33, where Abraham challenges God's decision about the punishment of Sodom and Gomorrah. God argues with Abraham, and in the argument Abraham convinces God. The decision of God about history is implemented through human participation. Human responsibility and the freedom of choice, manifested in the faithfulness to or the betrayal of the covenant between God and man, is the true motivating force behind Peterson's understanding of history.98 The achievement of Schmitt is often misunderstood by modern scholars less well trained in theology, or trained in that version of theology which is based on the mediaeval Latin tradition. In fact, the "Catholicism" of Schmitt belonged to that special breed of German nationalistic Catholicism, which was based rather on race than on the idea of the Church Universal. It is

Koslowski, "Zum Begriff," p. 35. Ibid., p. 44. 97 See Ernst Lewalter, "Eschatalogie und Weltgeschichte in der Gedankenwelt Augustins," Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte 53 (1934): pp. 1-51. Challenging this view of the last period of the history of redemption was the principal issue behind the condemnation of the views of Joachim of Fiore as well. 98 In his important paper, "Das Problem des Nationalismus im alten Christentum," in Frühkirche, Judentum und Gnosis Peterson develops a very interesting view of history depending on the free choice of the nations, in tune with his understanding of Romans 1. 95 96

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probably not unjustified on Peterson's part that he alludes to the heretical character of'political theology.' 99 Peterson spoke in the name of orthodox doctrine. The course of history, however, ran as Kantorowicz and Schmitt described. And this history resulted in the rallying cry of the German Christians of Thuringia (November 11, 1933): "One nation! One god! One Empire! One Church!" 100 and the prologue to the Gospel of John was rewritten as "In the beginning was the nation, and the nation was with God, and the nation was God." 101 It seems to be the moral of the debate that the more secular power the Church and the Papacy wanted to acquire, the more of its spiritual force was appropriated by the secular power. In a certain sense the debate on political theology was decided by history. 'Political theology' came to hold sway in possibly its most developed form. Nothing taught better the essence of the resulting "atheistic theocracy" 102 than the reign of the god of political theology, which all three protagonists were to experience. From their respective symbolic positions, the lawyer from Berlin, the theologian from Rome, and the historian from America all saw the deadly end of that road.

Peterson, "Kaiser Augustus," p. 174. Quoted by Ernst L. Fellechner, "Zur biographischen und tehologischen Entwicklung Petersons bis 1935—Eine Skizze," in Schindler, ed., Monotheismus, p. 118, n. 198, with reference to W. Hofer, ed., Der Nationalsozialismus. Dokumente 1933-1945 (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1962), p. 131. 100 Quoted by Koslowski, "Politischer Monotheismus," p. 44, with appropriate references. 101 Quoted ibid., with appropriate references. 102 This expressive phrase was coined by György Tatar, quite in tune with the sympathy that Schmitt had for Charles Maurras, who is attributed with the famous epitome of his intellectual position as "Je suis athée, mais je suis catholique."

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63 THE KING OF KINGS AND THE HOLY MEN: ROYAL AUTHORITY AND SACRED POWER IN THE EARLY BYZANTINE WORLD Cristian

Gafpar

Late Roman emperors ruling over what after Constantine's conversion became an increasingly Christianized empire were, in a way, strange beings. They occupied an ambiguous position, somewhere between the divinity traditionally ascribed to Roman emperors and the humanity they now shared, as subjects of Christ, the heavenly and eternal Ruler, with those over whom they ruled on earth. This was a position that the rapidly evolving Christian political theology tried to accommodate and justify, not without some embarrassment. Unlike the refined theologians whose writings we can read today, not all the subjects of the Christian emperors were equally adept at drawing the boundary between heaven and earth.1 Some of them were clearly prepared to acknowledge the man sitting on the imperial throne as a divine being, whose holiness was transmitted to everything that came into contact with his august person. 2 The language of imperial propaganda, with its increased and "repetitive insistence on all things imperial" certainly did not help dispel the ambiguity.3 The emperor, however, was not the only mortal whom many in Late Antiquity regarded as a powerful representative of the holy. The first century of the Christian Roman Empire also witnessed the emergence of a formidable figure, that of the "holy man." 4 Both Christians and non-Christians thought

1 See the excellent recent overview by Christopher Kelly, "Emperors, Government and Bureaucracy," in The Cambridge Antient Histoiy, vol. 13, The Late Umpire, A.D. 337^425, ed. Averil Cameron and Peter Garnsey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 138— 50, esp. 14CM-3. 2 In the first half of the fifth century, bishop Appion of Syene petitioned Emperor Theodosius II in the following terms: "I throw myself on the ground, before your divine and spodess footprints. [...] And if I obtain this, I shall raise up to God the customary prayers for your perpetual power" (text quoted and translated in Peter Brown, "Power and Persuasion in hate Antiquity: Towards a Christian Empire (Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), p. 141). 3 Kelly, "Emperors," p. 143 with relevant examples. 4 On this, see the classic study by Peter Brown, "The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity," The Journal of Roman Studies 61 (1971): pp. 80-101, reprinted with additional notes in his Society and the Holy in bate Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), pp. 103-52 with the qualifying remarks in Brown's recent study "The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity, 1971-1997 " Journal of Early Christian Studies 6.3

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that his connection with the sacred was equally strong, if not stronger than that of the emperor, and his earthly influence often collided with, and challenged that of the enthroned ruler.5 In this context, the problem of the attitude of the earthly ruler towards holy men gained a special importance. The emperor's relationship with the holy men whom he came to meet personally or who appealed to him from afar became an important criterion in establishing his status as a just and legitimate ruler. This is perfectly illustrated by the case of Emperor Valens (364—378), whose strange death in the battle of Adrianople was explained by both Nicene Christian and pagan sources as a direct consequence of his disrespect and persecution of holy men.6 How, then, should a king or an emperor behave towards a holy man? Was the holder of earthly authority, whom many people in Late Antiquity, regardless of their religion, would have revered as a sacred vicar of celestial powers, expected to yield when confronted with the charismatic authority of the holy man, who was equally (if not even more) revered by the same people? Among the numerous miracles ascribed to St. Simeon the Stylite (d. 459) by his anonymous Syriac hagiographer(s), one provides a firm answer to this question. It speaks of an imagined interaction between a Christian holy man and one of the mightiest divine rulers of Late Antiquity—the Persian King of Kings, "partner with the stars, brother of the Sun and Moon,"7 as he would sometimes style himself. Apparently it took no more than a threatening message from the Stylite to put an end to a raging anti-Christian persecution in Persia some time at the beginning of the fifth century. This message, addressed by Simeon to the Persian king through his chief magus, was couched in powerful and unequivocal terms. Thus says Simeon, he who stands on a pillar in the land of the West: unless you send and free all those servants of God who are imprisoned, and unless you stop completely the persecution of the Churches of Christ either giving

(1998): pp. 353-76; for non-Christian holy men, see Garth Fowden, "The Pagan Holy Man in Late Antique Society," Journal ofHellenic Studies 102 (1982): pp. 33-59. 5 For a study of parrhesia "freedom of speech" as manifested by Christian holy men in their relations with Roman emperors and officials, see Brown, Power and Persuasion, pp. 106-108, 144 et passim. 6 The death of Valens and its uses by Christian and pagan propaganda are discussed in detail by Noel Lenski, "Initium mali Romano imperio\ Contemporary Reactions to the Batde of Adrianople," Transactions of the American Philological Association 127 (1997): pp. 152-55. 7 Particeps siderum, frater Solis et Lunae was, according to Ammianus Marcellinus (Res gestae 17.5.3), the official tide of Shapur II (309-379) in a letter he sent to the Roman emperor Constantius II in 358; Ammianus' information is probably accurate, and his version of the tide may reflect actual Sasanid chancery usage; see Ammien Marcellin, Histoire, vol. 2, ed. Guy Sabbah (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1970), p. 173, n. 49.

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the order in person or by written documents, I will bring upon you after three more days an affliction and a sentence far crueler that that of your servant.8 As the hagiographer(s) would have it, the king had no chance but to comply, especially after learning about the terrible punishment that befell his chief magus, the instigator and main perpetrator of the anti-Christian violence: "when he who is called the King of Kings received the letters [...] he immediately commanded all the Christians who had been imprisoned to be set free." 9 It is probable that, throughout the centuries, coundess pious audiences reacted with the expected amazement and reverence when presented with this story. On the contrary, modern scholars might find serious reasons to be skeptical about the Stylite's successful intervention. 10 Even among those living in Late Antiquity, there were authors who thought that it would take more than a holy man's rebuke to make the Persian monarch change his mind about such an important issue as religious tolerance. To these, bullying the King of Kings into changing his religious convictions and policies would have probably seemed as a course of action that was equally inappropriate and inelegant. Instead, persuasion and personal charisma had to play an important role if a significant outcome was expected. In what follows I will examine and compare two passages from late antique texts which employ what certain scholars would call a "hagiographie discourse" 11 and try to set them in context. Both texts make use of an episode with a structure similar to that of the miracle quoted above. A holy man (pagan or Christian), using his spiritual influence, proves successful in determinThe Syriac Life of Saint Simeon Stylites 69 as in The Lives of Simeon Stylites, trans, with an introduction by Robert Doran (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1992), pp. 149-50. 9 Ibid., p. 150. 10 Two major persecutions of Persian Christians occurred during the Stylite's lifetime. The first happened ca. 420 CE during the reigns of Yazdgerd I (399^120) and of his son Bahrim V (420-438). It took a significant display of Byzantine military might, a veritable "crusade," which some have ascribed to the influence of Pulcheria, emperor Theodosius II's sister, to determine the Persians to end the persecution; on these events see Kenneth G. Holum, Theodosian 1impresses: Women and Imperial Dominion in Late Antiquity (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1982), pp. 102-103 and 121-23; R. C. Blockley, East Roman Policy: Formation and Conduct from Diocletian to Anastasius (Leeds: Francis Cairns, 1992), pp. 56-59 as well as Richard N. Frye, "The Political History of Iran under the Sasanians," in The Cambridge History of Iran, vol. 3, pt. 1, ed. Ehsan Yarshater (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 144—46 and J. P. Asmussen, "Christians in Iran," ibid., vol. 3, pt. 2, pp. 939-40. A second persecution broke out around 445 in the reign of Bahrain's son Yazdgerd II (438-57); for this, see J. Labourt, Le Christianisme dans l'Empire perse sous la dynastie Sassanide (224-632) (Paris: Librairie Victor Lecoffre, 1904), pp. 126-27; Arthur Christensen, L'Iran sous les Sassanides, 2nd ed. (Copenhaguen: Ejnar Munksgaard, 1944), pp. 281-84; Asmussen, "Christians," p. 942; and below, n. 24 and 25. The Syriac Life probably refers to the first persecution. 11 See Marc van Uytfanghe, "L'hagiographie: un «genre» chrétien ou antique tardif?" Analecta Bollandiana 111 (1993): pp. 135-188, esp. 148-49 for a definition of this concept. 8

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ing the King of Kings to change his religious beliefs and behavior to an extent which the authors considered significant. The main aim of my inquiry is to determine the purpose standing behind this particular narrative choice as well as the actual rhetorical means the authors used in order to achieve this purpose. The first passage, extracted from the Lives of the Sophists written by Eunapius of Sardis (ca. 399), 12 describes an episode involving Eustathius the Cappadocian, 13 a pagan disciple of the famous Neoplatonic philosopher Iamblichus. Eunapius' account of Eustathius is introduced by a hagiographic topos that sets the tone of what will follow. 14 After a quick note on the philosopher's excellent character,15 Eunapius spoke of what he obviously wished to present as the main feature of his hero: his polished, elegant, and highly effective eloquence. This he superlatively described with the help of two Homeric allusions.16 The subsequent narrative was then offered as proof of the actual power of Eustathius' eloquence. An unnamed Christian emperor, beleaguered by an unexpected Persian attack which had already led to the capture of Antioch, the greatest city of the Roman East, found himself forced to sue for peace. Although a pagan, Eustathius was unanimously recommended as the best ambassador to be sent to Persia, despite the fact that his only credential for such a task was "the potent charm of his lips" as against the mili-

12 Eunapius, Vitae sophistarum, ed. G. Giangrande (Rome: Typis publicae officinae polygraphicae, 1956), pp. 25-27 (henceforth VS). All English translations of this text are taken from Philostratus, Lives of the Sophists. Eunapius, Lives of the Philosophers, transl. Wilmer Cave Wright (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1921; repr., 1998), pp. 343-564. On the dating of the VS, see Thomas M. Banchich, "The Date of Eunapius' Vitae Sophistarum," Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies 25 (1984): pp. 183-92. See also David F. Buck, "Eunapius' Lives of the Sophists: A Literary Study," By^antion 62 (1992): pp. 141-57, an essential contribution. 13 VS 6.5.1-10; for a detailed discussion of Eustathius, see Robert J. Penella, Greek Philosophers and Sophists in the Fourth Centuiy A. D. (Leeds: Francis Cairns, 1990), pp. 50-58. A valuable overview with references to recent literature is provided by R. Goulet, "Eustathe de Cappadoce," in idem, ed., Dictionnaire des philosophes antiques, vol. 3 (Paris: CNRS Editions, 2000), pp. 369-78. 14 "With regard to Eustathius, it would be sacrilegious to leave out what would convey the truth" (VS 6.5.1; Wright, p. 393). 15 "All men were agreed that he both appeared and was a most noble character" (ibid.; Wright, p. 393, slightly altered). 16 "His mildness and amiability so blossomed out in what he said and gushed forth with his words, that those who heard his voice and his speeches surrendered themselves like men who had tasted the lotus" (ibid.; Wright, p. 395); see Homer Od. 9.94-97; "so closely did he resemble to the musical Syrens" (VS 6.5.2; Wright, p. 395); see Homer Od. 12.39-44.

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tary experience and distinction of previous ambassadors.17 Eustathius proceeded on his way, joined by others, curious to see him at work. Once they reached the Persian capital, he managed to impress Shapur, the Persian king, with "the expression of his eyes which was at once amiable and proudly indifferent, in spite of the many preparations that the king had devised in order to dazzle and overawe the man."18 Shapur seemed so fascinated and enslaved by Eustathius' voice and skillful speech that he readily granted him the particular favor of a private audience and the utmost honor of becoming his companion at table.19 Moreover, according to Eunapius, the Greek philosopher won "such influence over him that the king of Persia came within an ace of renouncing his upright tiara, laying aside his purple and bejewelled attire, and putting on instead the philosopher's cloak of Eustathius."20 Unfortunately, Shapur's untimely conversion to philosophy was prevented by some magi, who accused Eustathius of being a charlatan.21 In spite of this, Eunapius could happily conclude that "the whole result of the embassy was beyond men's expectations."22 The second passage I intend to discuss comes from the Philotheos historia written by Theodoret, bishop of Cyrrhus, in 444. 23 It presents an episode from the life of the aforementioned St. Simeon the Stylite, who spent most of

"The earlier emperors had been accustomed to elect for embassies men who had won distinction in the army, or military prefects, or men who were next in rank to these and had been selected for office" (VS 6.5.3; Wright, p. 395). 18 VS 6.5.6; Wright, p. 397. 19 This could be a Herodotean reminiscence (see Herodot Histories 3.132), but might also reflect contemporary Persian ceremonial, which indicated a person's standing by his/her closeness to the King of Kings; see Josef Wiesehôfer, Ancient Persia: From 550 BC to 650 AD, trans. Azizeh Azodi (London: I. B. Tauris Publishers, 2001), p. 172, quoting Ammianus Marcellinus Res gestae 18.5.6. 20 VS 6.5.8; Wright, p. 397. 21 VS 6.5.9; Wright, pp. 397-99. During the first centuries of the Roman Empire, such accusations of goêteia "magic" were frequently used in order to undermine the position of people who wanted to pass as "holy men," but whose extreme ascetic practices were perceived as dangerous or disruptive of the established social values. For an excellent analysis of this use, see James A. Francis, Subversive Virtue: Asceticism and Authority in the Second-Centuiy Pagan World (University Park, PE: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), pp. 48-50, 80 et passim. 22 VS 6.5.10; Wright, p. 399. 23 Theodoret of Cyrrhus, Philotheos historia 26.20 (henceforth HPh); for the Greek text, see Théodoret de Cyr, Histoire des moines de Syrie: Histoire Philothée, vol. 2, ed. Pierre Canivet and Alice Leroy-Molinghen (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 1979), pp. 200-202. Theodoret's life and works are conveniently presented in Yvan Azéma, "Theodorét," in Dictionnaire de spiritualité ascétique et mystique, doctrine et histoire, vol. 15, ed. V. Miller et al. (Paris: Beauchesne, 1991), pp. 418—35. A detailed study of the Philotheos historia is also available: Pierre Canivet, Le monachisme syrien selon Théodoret de Cyr (Paris: Editions Beauchesne, 1977). 17

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his earthly life on a pillar in fifth-century northern Syria.24 According to Theodoret, after many years of standing on his pillar, Simeon's fame had spread far and wide, being "also great with the king of the Persians. As the envoys who went to him related, he wished to inquire carefully about the man's way of life and the nature of his miracles." 25 In this, the king was followed by his courtiers, who, "struck by [the saint's] reputation, and despite hearing from the Magi many calumnies against him, wished to inquire precisely, and on being informed called him a holy man." 26 The saint's power was also acknowledged by the queen and by other people who heard the stories about Simeon: all these tried to procure oil that was blessed by the saint.27 I wish to suggest that the behavior described here by Theodoret, if falling very short of religious conversion, can be construed as a significant transformation or religious beliefs and practices. According to Theodoret, the King of Kings and his courtiers acknowledged Simeon, a Christian ascetic, as a "holy man," while the queen and the simpler folk readily believed in the miraculous power of the oil that was blessed by the saint and rushed to procure it. The similarities between the two fragments should be obvious by now: both present a holy man (pagan and Christian) who confronts the King of Kings—either face to face or indirectly. In both cases, the King is deeply influenced by the spiritual power of the holy man; in acknowledging this influence, the king has to revise his own spiritual beliefs, and comes close to a "conversion." The mag, representatives of the King's own spiritual tradition, are presented as opponents to this important change by both Eunapius and Theodoret. Beyond these basic similarities, there are obvious and significant differences between the two accounts. Eusthatius had to travel and meet the King, since that was the only way he could fully use the irresistible and almost magical power of his eloquence. Simeon, whose lifestyle left no room for such mobility, influenced the king from afar through "hagiographic" reports about On Simeon the Stylite, see the hagiographic texts conveniently collected in Doran, The Lives of Simeon Stylites, as well as the extensive literature quoted by Susan Ashbrook Harvey, "The Sense of a Stylite: Perspectives on Simeon the Elder," Vigiliae Christianae 42 (1988): pp. 376-94 and, more recendy, by Antony Eastmond, "Body vs. Column: The Cults of St. Symeon Stylites," in Desire and Denial in Byzantium, ed. Liz James (Aldershot, G. B: Ashgate, 1999), pp. 87-100. 25 HPh 26.20; the English translation is that of R. M. Price in Theodoret of Cyrrhus, History of the Monks in Syria (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1985), pp. 169-70. 26 Ibid. 27 "And his spouse is said to have asked for oil honored by his blessing and to have received it as a very great gift. [...] The rest of the crowd, going up to the muleteers, servants and soldiers, offered them money begging to receive a share in the blessing attached to the oil" (ibid., Price, p. 170, slightly altered). 24

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his life and miracles. The magi were successful in preventing Shapur's conversion to a Greek philosophic lifestyle. They failed to affect Simeon's status as a holy man, which was recognized, after due consideration, by the Persian King and received further confirmation through specific acts of worship. Apparently, the pagan holy man was unsuccessful in effecting the conversion of the King of Kings, although he got to see him face to face, while his later Christian counterpart managed to achieve such a conversion without even leaving his column in northern Syria. However, a conclusion along these lines would ignore the basic polemical purpose of the two texts, to which I would like to turn in the second part of this contribution. Namely, despite his hero's failed attempt to convert the King of Kings, Eunapius was still able to claim that "the whole result of the embassy was beyond men's expectations." We know from another, more reliable source, that the embassy sent to Persia in 358, in which Eustathius took part alongside other, more important characters,28 was a complete failure. After a long and fruidess stay at the Persian court, the delegation returned to Roman territory empty-handed and later another embassy had to be sent on the same way.29 Similarly, despite Theodoret's claims, the Persian King Yazdgerd II (who ruled between 439 and 457) must have showed little respect—if any—to Christian holy men in his own realm, let alone to one dwelling on a pillar in the distant land of the Romans. In fact, Yazdgerd II started a violent and cruel anti-Christian persecution only a few years after the time when Theodoret wrote his imagined account of the king's reverent acceptance of Simeon the Stylite as a "holy man." 30 Theodoret himself had to acknowledge the king's change of heart some years after composing the Philotheos historia}1

28

The other members of the embassy were Spectatus, tribunus et notarius, a cousin of Libanius, who highly praised him for his role during this diplomatic mission, and the comes Prosper, a military officer of some importance (he functioned as pro maestro equitum per Orientem)\ see J. R. Martindale, ed., Prosopographj of the Later Roman Empire, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 850-51 and 751. 29 Ammianus Marcellinus Res gestae 17.5.15 and 17.14 (Ammianus was a contemporary observer of the events) with P. de Jonge, Philological and Historical Commentary on Ammianus Marcellinus XVII (Groningen: Bouma's Boekhuis b. v. Publishers, 1977), pp. 163-66. An extensive study of the embassy of 358 is available in Giovanni Battista Pighi, Nuovi studi ammianei (Milan: Società editrice "Vita e Pensiero," 1936), pp. 131-99. 30 According to the ancient sources, Yazdgerd II unleashed a ruthless persecution against the Christians living in his domains in 445-446. Theodoret's Historia philotheos was written around the year 444. Alice Leroy-Molinghen was able to establish a precise date (in 444) for ch. 26 of this work, which recounts the life of St. Simeon the Stylite; see her study "A propos de la «Vie» de Syméon Stylite" By^antion 34 (1964): pp. 375-84, esp. 381-82. There is no need to question this sound dating, although some modem scholars persist in doubting LeroyMolinghen's conclusions; cf. the unconvincing attempt by R. M. Price in his "Introduction" to Theodoret of Cyrrhus, A History of the Monks, pp. xii-xv, who argued for a date around

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What mattered to both our authors was not history, which they appear to have freely rewritten in order to suit their purposes, but something else that could easily be termed "religious propaganda."32 Actual historical events, as can be reconstructed from other contemporary sources, differed to a great extent from their fictional representations in the texts studied here. In Eunapius' case, there are, I think, several clear indications that his main (if undeclared) objective was to criticize the Christian emperor, his court, and Christianity in general from a militant anti-Christian position. He achieved this through a narrative strategy of which the main purpose was promoting Eustathius, a "man of Hellenic faith," as a philosophical superman able to save the Roman Empire—and the prestige of Roman civilization— from a dangerous confrontation with the Persians. In order to do this, Eunapius had to make up much of the danger. Thus, in his narrative of the events in 358 prior to the embassy, he intentionally included an episode recounting the siege and taking of Antioch by the Persians which had happened almost a century earlier.33 Although historically 440. This dating was also adopted by Theresa Urbainczyk in her recent book Theodoret of Cyrrhus: The Bishop and the Holy Man (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 2002). 31 It is certain that two of Theodoret's letters (Ep. 76 and 77) were sent to Christian bishops in Persian Armenia during this persecution; see Théodoret de Cyr, Correspondance, vol. 2 (Epist. Sirm. 1-95), ed. Yvan Azéma (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 1964), pp. 167-83. Moreover, I think it probable that Theodoret's presentation of the anti-Christian persecution of 421-22 in his Ecclesiastic History, written around 450, was probably influenced by the tragic events of the second persecution in Persia, to which it alluded. For a particularly hostile account of the King of Kings as a bloodthirsty persecutor, see Theodoret's Historia ecclesiastica 5.39.6; Greek text in Theodoret, Kirchengeschichte, ed. Léon Parmentier, 3rd revised edition by G. Chr. Hansen (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1998), p. 343. The fact that both kings were called Yazdgerd facilitated such an allusion. See, for instance, the comments by van Uytfanghe, "L'Hagiographie," pp. 156-59. While Eunapius' Lives of the Sophists are generally acknowledged as a work of pagan hagiography, the polemical intention of Theodoret's Philotheos historia is not equally recognized. I have argued that this work was composed as an apology of Christian monasticism for an intellectual (and to some extent pagan) audience in my study "Theodoret of Cyrrhus and the Glory of the Syrian Ascetics: Epic Terminology in Hagiographie Contexts I—II," Archaeus. Etudes d'Histoire des Religions 4.1-2 and 4.4 (2000): pp. 211-40 and 151-78. Both these late antique collections of Lives of holy men were part of the "textual war" in which representatives of Christian and pagan intellectual elite engaged during the fourth and fifth centuries; on this "war of biography," see Averil Cameron, Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire: The Development of Christian Discourse (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991), pp. 141-52, esp. 145. 33 The exact date of the capture of Antioch by the Persians is most probably 252 CE; see Glen W. Bowersock's review of Zosime, Histoire nouvelle, vol. 1 (Livres I—II), new edition by François Paschoud (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2000), in Antiquité tardive 9 (2001), p. 447. Penella's comments (Greek Philosophers, p. 53: "Wishing to allude to some detail that would illustrate the seriousness of the situation, Eunapius doubdess trusted his memory, which proved to be faulty in this case") are mistaken: Eunapius was not a victim of his faulty 32

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inaccurate, the link he established between the two events helped create the appropriately dramatic circumstances in which an outspoken pagan like Eustathius could emerge as the last hope of the Christian Roman realm. Furthermore, we are led to believe that Constantius, the Roman emperor, although "wrapped up in the books of the Christians" had no other choice but to take the advice of "all men [who] were so held captive and enchanted by Eustathius, that they did not hesitate to commend a man of the Hellenic faith to the ears of the emperor." 34 Eunapius insisted that his hero was the obvious and unanimous choice in the circumstances, although this claim is a blatant exaggeration, as other contemporary sources suggest. 35 He further mentioned that "those who had advised that the embassy should be dispatched in charge of Eustathius won greater consideration than before from the emperor." 36 From Ammianus Marcellinus we know that the person who suggested the composition of the embassy was Strategius Musonianus, 37 a Christian official highly praised by Libanius, but whom Eunapius did not name, probably because of his religious allegiance. Instead, he spoke of several unnamed political advisors, who influenced emperor Constantius to choose a pagan philosopher as his most appropriate ambassador. By doing so, he highlighted Eustathius' outstanding intellectual profile as a representative member of the pagan intellectual elite, which had been practically banned from the palace of Constantius II. It is obviously at this policy of exclusion that Eunapius aimed his criticism when he suggested that, regrettably, it was only in dramatic circumstances (such as those he conveniently invented) that a Christian emperor could be prevailed upon to make an exceptional appointment of this kind. 38 memory, but rather a shrewd manipulator of historical facts in accordance with his coherent narrative strategy. 34 VS 6.5.2-3; Wright, p. 395. 35 While philosophers and rhetors such as Eustathius were occasionally sent on embassies to foreign rulers by Byzantine emperors, men of military skill and high rank were usually preferred. For a good discussion of late Roman embassies and their personnel, see A. D. Lee, Information and Frontiers: Roman Foreign Relations in Late Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 45—48, esp. 45, n. 142 with a list of the few known examples of rhetors who served as ambassadors. VS 6.5.4; Wright, pp. 395-97. 37 Ammianus Marcellinus Res gestae 17.5.15: Musoniano suggerente. For Musonianus, see Jan Willem Drijvers, "Ammianus Marcellinus 15.13.1—2: Some Observations on the Career and Bilingualism of Strategius Musonianus," The Classical Quarterly n. s. 46.2 (1996): pp. 532-37 with references. 38 Libanius complained about the exclusion of prominent pagan intellectuals from decisionmaking circles at the court of Constantius II, who, much like his father Constantine before him, surrounded himself with Christian officials (see Libanius Or. 62.9-10). Such complaints are usually dismissed by many scholars of Late Antiquity, who like to think that Christians became prominent in high offices only towards the end of the fourth century; for a sound and methodologically accurate refutation of this view, see Timothy David Barnes, "Statistics

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Furthermore, Eunapius' account of the embassy focused not so much on its actual diplomatic dealings, which, as we know from Ammianus, failed completely, but rather on his hero's private meeting with the King of Kings. It was in this respect that, contrary to what actually happened, he could conclude that "the whole result of the embassy was beyond men's expectations." 39 What Eunapius wished to emphasize was Eustathius' mastery of eloquence, through which he was able to gain a remarkable, albeit fictitious, influence over the Persian king. Such accomplished rhetorical skills were, naturally, an exclusive attribute of the traditionally educated pagan elite. That the King of Kings should be so receptive to the rhetorical endearments of an important member of this elite implies that he was in many respects wiser than his Roman Christian counterpart. I submit that Shapur's reaction to Eustathius' persuasive discourses (as imagined by Eunapius) had a double meaning. On one hand, it was intended as a celebration of the power of traditional rhetorically educated pagan elite. At the same time, it could function as an implicit criticism of the intolerant Christian emperor who, blinded by the Christians' sinister influence, refused to acknowledge and employ such beneficial power unless forced by the events. This much, I think, is suggested by the phrasing of the reply supposedly sent to the Romans by the Persian king. In Eunapius' wording, this said: "why, when Fortune had bestowed on them so many distinguished men, they sent [to the king] persons no better than slaves who had enriched themselves," 40 a clear allusion to the upstart Chrisand the Conversion of the Roman Aristocracy," The Journal of Roman Studies 85 (1995): pp. 135-47. 39 VS 6.5.10. Modern scholars sometimes failed to grasp the polemical intent of this statement and tried to eliminate what they regarded as an obvious "falsification" of historical truth by emending Eunapius' text; see the discussion in Penella, Greek Philosophers, pp. 57-58 with n. 43. Penella rightly observed that "it was the effect of Eustathius upon Sapor that could be described as 'beyond men's expectations.' [...] Eunapius puts Eustathius's philosophical training and eloquence on display and deflects attention away from the fact that the embassy was a diplomatic failure" (ibid., p. 58). To my mind, there is a clear polemical intent beyond this narrative choice, missed by Penella and others (cf., for instance, R. C. Blockley, East 'Roman Foreign Polity, p. 21, n. 55: "[Eunapius'] claim may be dismissed as a typical Eunapian hyperbole"). 40 VS 6.5.10: xi Sr|7tOT£ avSpac eotuxouvtec toioutouq, Eua 7tE|i7touaiv avSpanoScov TiXouxouvToov ou8ev SiacpEpovtag; Wright, p. 399. I think it likely that a reply couched in such strikingly non-diplomatic terms was never sent by the King of Kings. This looks more like one of those snide attacks against the Christian emperors and their entourage which are still numerous in Eunapius' surviving writings and must have been even more so in the lost fragments of his History. Nevertheless, modern historians have sometimes taken Eunapius' words as an accurate report of Shapur's message; c£, for instance, John F. Matthews, "Hostages, Philosophers, Pilgrims, and the Diffusion of Ideas in the Late Roman Mediterranean and Near East," in Tradition and Innovation in hate Antiquity, ed. F. M. Clover and R. S. Humphreys (Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), pp. 29-49,

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tian officials favored by Constantius and by his father, Constantine. Eunapius strikes a further critical note of the Chrisdan emperor and his entourage in the imagined philosophical sermon delivered by Eustathius before the Persian king. This is how, I think, we should understand his reference to "those who cared about their bodies." This is a general criticism of the Christians, whom he and many other late antique pagans liked to present as far removed from the superior, spiritual understanding of the world embedded in traditional Greek philosophy. 41 Theodoret, although writing some fifty years after Eunapius, probably wished to make a similar point. If the Persian King of Kings and his courtiers, here used as symbolic figures representing any ruling elite, could accept Simeon the Christian as a holy man, this obviously meant that Christianity could produce spiritual models worthy of royal appreciation and veneration. Furthermore, I think it is important to note that Theodoret carefully distinguished two possible ways of "accepting" Simeon's status. On one hand, the king himself "tried to get informed carefully about the man's life and about his miracles" before reaching any conclusion. In this, he was followed by all those in his retinue: "and all those around the king, struck by his (viz. Simeon's) reputation, even if they also heard all kind of calumnies against him from the magi, tried to inform themselves exacdy and, once they had learnt [about him], called him 'holy man'." 42 In opposition to these, "the other crowd went to the muleteers, to the servants and to the soldiers and, bringing them money, begged to procure for them the benediction of the oil." The queen herself is presented in the same

esp. 41 and R. C. Blockley, "Constantius II and Persia," in Studies in "Latin "Literature and Roman History, vol. 5, ed. Carl Deroux (Brussels: Latomus, 1989), pp. 465-90, here 481 with n. 88. 41 VS 6.5.10: xa\ elg TOCTOOTO xaxo5ai^ovia toug cpiXoaconaTouc evriyaye. Touc (pi/U)aa)|J.aTOOum 70. Geburtstag am 19. September 1971 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1971), p. 242, n. 44. 18 Ermoldus Nigellus In honorem Hludowici 4.267—282, in MGH Poetae Latini aevi Carolini, vol. 2 (Berlin: Weidmann, 1884), p. 66. The construction of the palace began in the reign of Charlemagne, but was most likely finished under Louis the Pious. Lammers, "Ein karolingisches Bildprogramm," pp. 234—5, n. 33 argues that the palace must have been finished by 807. At any rate, the frescoes might have been made after the palace was completed. 19 See Lammers, "Ein karolingisches Bildprogramm," pp. 267-74.

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.. .and the wise Charles shows his gracious face, and bears rightfully on his crowned head a diadem; here stands a Saxon war-band, daring him to batde; he fights them, masters them, and draws them under his law.20 This imagery must be understood in relation to other monarchic imagery produced in the reign of Louis the Pious. Einhard notes that a golden arch with Charlemagne's image and title was constructed over the emperor's grave in Aachen. 21 This arch did not survive, but we have a seventeenthcentury drawing of the cross-base in the shape of a triumphal arch—made some time in the 820s, probably at the court school—that Einhard donated to the church of St. Servatius in Maastricht.22 The upper register of this anus argenteus presents Christ and his apostles, while the middle level is filled with the evangelists. The lower register, on the other hand, has the imagery reminiscent of Roman imperial prototypes: there are four figures on the front and rear sides of the arch; they are clad in the traditional military attire of Roman emperors and hold spears and shields. There are halos around their heads, a traditional attribute of late Roman imperial imagery. It is impossible to determine whom these personages represent; similarly to the wall painting in Ingelheim, they might depict late Roman and Carolingian rulers.23 The use of visual simile between late Roman emperors and Carolingian rulers in the reign of Louis the Pious may be confirmed by the best known contemporary image of a Carolingian ruler, Louis the Pious, which was created as an illustration to the poetic work of Hrabanus Maurus, In honorem sanctae cruds.24 This miniature was painted only in the mid-830s, but it matches The translation is by Caecilia Davis-Weyer, Early Medieval Art, 300-1150: Sources and Documents (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1971), p. 88. 21 "... arcusque supra tumulum deauratus cum imagine et titulo exstructus," Einhard Vita Caroli 31. For details and references, see Schramm, Die deutschen Kaiser, pp. 150-1. 22 See Karl Hauck, ed., Das EinhardkreuVorträge und Studien der Müsteraner Diskussion ?um arcus Einhardi, Abhandlungen der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Göttingen, no. 87 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1974). 23 Schramm thought that these figures represented holy warriors, while rulers' imagery is presented by two equestrian figures seen on the inner walls of the arch, Schramm, Die deutschen Kaiser; pp. 152—4. This interpretation presents one significant problem: the figures are on the inner walls of the arch, which were not well seen by observers. On Roman triumphal arches the figures of emperors are normally carved on the front and back sides as, for instance, on the arch of Constantine. 24 Rabanus Maurus, In honorem sanctae cruds, Corpus Christianorum, Continuatio Medievalis, vol. 100-100A, ed. M. Perrin (Turnhout: Brepols, 1997). For a detailed analysis see Michele Ferrari, "Hrabanica. Hrabanus De laudibus sanctae cruds im Spiegel der neueren Forschung", in Kloster Fulda in der Welt der Karolinger und Ottonen, ed. Gangolf Schrimpf (Frankfurt: Knecht, 1996), pp. 493-526; and id., II Uber sanctae cruds di Rabano Mauro: testo-immagine-contesto, Lateinische Sprache und Literatur des Mittelalters, vol. 30 (Bern: Lang, 1999). It is symptomatic that the first dedicatory image of a ruler appeared in the reign of Louis the Pious, though 20

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visual "vocabulary" employed at the Carolingian court in the 810-820s.25 Louis the Pious is depicted as a holy emperor in triumph.26 He is crowned with a nimbus and stands wearing a blue military cloak—this might be either a Roman paludamentum or a Frankish sagurn venetum11—over a breastplate and tunic, leather boots and a helmet. All these elements were characteristic of the military costume of the Roman emperors, but the painter often blended a classical pattern with familiar Frankish elements.28 In this case, the figure holds a cross-staff in his right hand and is touching a shield with his left one. There are various interpretations of this image and its classical model,29 but more important is the fact that this image imitated the previous imperial symbols of power, namely, the halo, the paludamentum, and the cross-staff. The latter was "an attribute of victorious Christian emperors, late antique as well as Byzantine."30 Finally, the sculptured posture of the image, which recalls the classical imperial prototype,31 does not leave space for any gesture characteristic of later royal images. This imitation of the classical model was not something peculiar only to the book illumination produced at the Court School of Louis the Pious or in a close relation to his court. Instead, this depiction developed the earlier tradition of presenting imperial authority on coins, bulls, seals, and frescoes—that is, in media closely connected to the imperial some books, such as Dagulfs Psalter had dedicatory verses already at the time of Charlemagne. 25 For the analysis of this image and all references, see Elizabeth Sears, "Louis the Pious as Miles Christi. The Dedicatory Image in Hrabanus Maurus's De laudibus sanctae cruris" in Charlemagne's Heir: New Perspectives on the Reign of Louis the Pious (814-840), ed. Peter Godman and Roger Collins (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), pp. 605-27; Michel Perrin, "La représentation figurée de césar-Louis le Pieux chez Raban Maur en 835: Religion et idéologie," Francia 24.1 (1997): pp. 39-64. 26 The final lines of the poem state this beyond doubt: Conscripsi dudum nam Christi laude libellum Versibus etprosa, tibi quern nunc, induperator, Offero, sancta, libens, cuius praecedit imago Stans armatafide,victorem monstrat ubique (11. 47-50). 27 For details see Garipzanov, "The Image of Authority in Carolingian Coinage," pp. 215-7. 28 For instance, boots, a helmet, and shield are rather of an early medieval and Frankish type than of a Roman one. The whole image unites Roman imperial and Frankish features. For details see Sears, "Louis the Pious," p. 612. 29 Schramm, Die deutschen Kaiser, pp. 46-7 and 158-9, proposed that this image in all features such as the costume, posture and physiognomy followed an antique prototype. On the other hand, Sears ("Louis the Pious," pp. 611-2) argues that, though its relation to the Roman imperial portrait is beyond doubt, the image deviated from classical models formally and conceptually. 30 Ibid., p. 616. 31 For instance, see the imperial diptych, dated to the fifth century, representing Emperor Honorius from Aosta, ibid., fig. 36.

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court—and this tradition ultimately derived from late Roman visual "vocabulary." The accompanying text of the carmen figuratum strengthens the simile of Louis the Pious with late Roman emperors.32 The connection between Christ and the Carolingian king is the leitmotiv of the dedicatory poem as well as of the verses hidden in the imperial image.33 Based on this link, together with the military insignia of the image, Sears argues that Louis the Pious is presented here as a miles Christie Yet the late Roman and early Byzantine emperors were also seen as possessing the same intimate connection with Christ, who was to protect them and their empire. The most evident example is the panegyric poem In laudem lustini Augusti minoris, written by Flavius Cresconius Corippus in Constantinople in 566—567.35 The comparison of the two poems demonstrates that not only the visual image of Louis the Pious but also the textual one in the poem by Hrabanus Maurus follow the late Roman and early Byzantine representations of a triumphant emperor, the earthly governor of Christ.36 Thus, there is enough evidence to believe that rulers' imagery produced at or for the court of Louis the Pious adopted the mode of imperial representation developed in the late Roman and early Byzantine empire in the third through sixth century. A significant feature of Carolingian rulers' imagery in this period is that it did not affect the illuminations of contemporary religious manuscripts. The ruler's iconography employed in the courtly context or in legal manu-

32

Hrabanus' poem was inspired by Porfyrius' carmina figurata presented to Constantine the Great, ibid., p. 624. 33 Louis the Pious' halo frames the words "tu Hludovvicum Criste corona." His head and body bears another verse: Iesu Criste, tuum, vertice, signum Augusti galeam conferet almam invictam etfaciat optima dextram virtus, Iesu, tua detque triumfum ... The verse on the shield starts with "nam scutum fidei depellit tela nefanda, protegit augustum clara tropaea parans," Hrabanus Maurus In honorem sanctae crutis 15-6. For the further interpretation of the text see Sears, "Louis the Pious," pp. 606-7. 34 Ibid., pp. 614-24. 35 In the early Middle Ages, this poem was copied in Visigothic Spain, Flavius Cresconius Corippus, In laudem lustini Augusti minoris, UbrilV, ed. Averil Cameron (Athlone: University of London, 1976), p. 20, and was probably known to Gothic intellectuals in Southern Gaul such as Benedict of Aniane. 36 This correlates with the strong connection between the image o f Christ and imperial one in the reign o f Louis the Pious. For details see Philip Le Maître, "Image du Christ, image de l'empereur. L'exemple du culte du Saint Sauveur sous Louis le Pieux," Revue d'histoire de l'église de France 68 (1982): pp. 201-12.

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scripts 37 —irrespective of what visual tradition, Roman imperial or Frankish, it followed—was separated from the imagery in religious manuscripts. In the reign of Charlemagne and Louis the Pious, their images were "barred" from being depicted in liturgical manuscripts together with sacred personages such as evangelists or David, let alone Christ. Only in the 840s did the rift between two spheres of Carolingian art, which can be called, though loosely, clerical and lay, disappeared, and Carolingian rulers began to be depicted in religious manuscripts such as gospelbooks, psalters and bibles. RULERS' PORTRAITS IN RELIGIOUS MANUSCRIPTS AT THE TIME OF CHARLES THE BALD

The imagery of Carolingian rulers produced in religious manuscripts in the mid-ninth century (table 1) raises the question of its function and meaning in every particular codex due to the various authors and audiences of the individual codices. The traditional approach, first expressed by Percy Schramm and thereafter taken for granted by many historians, is that they present the self-image of the monarch and, therefore, allow us to understand the monarch's own political concept of kingship. Yet this approach is problematic for two main reasons. First, some mid-ninth-century images were created outside the court and present iconographic as well as political concepts of particular monastic communities or the monks involved in their creation. Second, even when there are reasons to believe that a particular royal image was depicted at a court school, the question still remains how much this image was defined or influenced by a ruler's political conceptions. It is very doubtful that the ruler himself instructed the artists on how he had to be depicted in a given miniature. Instruction might have come from a member of his court supervising the activity of the court school, but it is also unclear how detailed would such instructions have been. 38 It is true, however, that the artists of the court school had to consider their assumed audience; therefore, they would have tended to produce a royal image which could be understood by and receive a positive response from the members of the court and the king in particular. Finally, let us remember that these images were

37

In my dissertation I am going to analyse these as well, but as they are not immediately relevant to the present subject, I have omitted them for reasons of economy. 38 The Gospel of Lothar written outside the imperial court provides a hint of the role this intermediary played in the production of the manuscript. A dedicatory poem in this Gospel, commissioned by Lothar in the monastery of St. Martin of Tours (table 1, #3), mentions that Lothar I ordered this book to be decorated with gold and miniatures, while the minute supervision over the production of the manuscript was entrusted to another person, Sigilaus.

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produced in religious manuscripts; therefore, in a manner of speaking, God could have been envisioned as their supreme audience.39 The final point, the provenance of royal imagery in religious manuscripts, was further developed by Joachim Wollasch. Arguing against Schramm's approach, he pointed out that the majority of the ninth-through eleventh-centuries manuscripts in which the royal imagery appeared were liturgical books. 40 T o use a liturgical book, which was employed in the sacred mystery of worshiping God, as a simple carrier for royal self-representation would have been an obvious trespass on the divine sphere. Wollasch proposes another explanation: the royal images in liturgical manuscripts donated to monasteries visuali2ed, indeed, the "confraternity" between the rulers and monastic communities and the assurance of royal well-being by means of monastic commemorative prayers. Thus, a ruler's portrait in a liturgical manuscript could not be misunderstood as arrogance in regard to the divine Lord, but it received a clearly defined communicative function in the reciprocal relationship between the ruler and a monastic community.41 Wollasch's thesis postulating a communicative function of a ruler's imagery is convincing, but a problem still remains, namely, that under the definition of liturgical manuscripts he unifies prayerbooks, psalters, evangelistaries with gospel pericopes, and gospelbooks with gospels in extenso. Only the prayerbooks and evangelistaries can be described as practical liturgical books similar to sacramentarles or ordines, which arranged the material by the temporal and sanctoral cycles of a liturgical year. Psalters, gospelbooks, as well as bibles, which also acquired royal imagery in the Carolingian period, were less adjusted to liturgical purposes, 42 and consequently were less useful 39 Hägen Keller, "Herrscherbild und Herrschaftslegitimation. Zur Deutung der ottonischen Denkmäler," Frühmittelalterliche Studien 19 (1985), p. 311, comes to a similar conclusion after the analysis of rulers's imagery in Ottonian manuscripts: "Sie sind nicht an ein großes Publikum adressiert, sondern haben ihren eigentlichen Platz, gewinnen ihre Bedeutung zwischen dem Herrscher, der Liturgie und Gott. Nur in diesem Kontext, so meine ich, können sie als 'Legitimationsbilder' der Königsherrschaft gelten." 40 Joachim Wollasch, "Kaiser und Könige als Brüder der Mönche: Zum Herrscherbild in liturgischen Handschriften des 9. bis 11. Jahrhunderts," Deutsches Archiv für Erforschung des Mittelalters 40 (1984), p. 17. 41 Ibid., 20. Keller, "Herrscherbild und Herrschaftslegitimation," pp. 290-311, argues that this function of rulers' images became more explicit in Ottonian times. 42 As for the Gospels, an additional Capitularía evangeliorum, listing what passages of the Gospels had to be used for every mass, were necessary in order to use this book in liturgy. For instance, the Codex Aureus of St. Emmeram (table 1, #7) had these capitula after the text of the Gospels and was probably actively used in the liturgy. Psalters could be used in liturgy but only together with other liturgical books such as a lectionary or antiphonary which contain references to the psalms which had to be performed on particular occasions. The Capitula

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for liturgical practice. 43 This does not mean that they could not be used and were not used in the liturgy. The point is that they were much more seen as compendia of divine law and texts for religious study as indeed numerous commentaries and glosses written on them at that time demonstrate. The Bible, Psalter, or Gospels were the books of the divine law, giving the clergy their identity; 44 to depict a ruler there meant to define royal authority in relation not only to God but also to the clergy as a social group. The appearance of the ruler's imagery in religious manuscripts, therefore, meant a more active involvement of the clergy in the visual dialogue on royal authority. These developments also reflected the changing perception of royal authority and of the power relations among God, the king, the clergy, and the people. These changes visually erased the separation between lay and religious authority. To depict a ruler in a religious manuscript meant to make him an intrinsic part of the divine order. This provided his authority with divine sanctification, but at the same time, divine authority—and the religious manuscripts were the quintessence of this authority—was imposing certain restrictions and limitations on his rule. The function of the ruler's imagery in religious manuscripts is closely related to the question of the messages they were supposed to transmit. Although these royal images might have addressed several different audiences, their origin at a court or at the monasteries closely affiliated with it made them relevant to the contemporary courtly political discourse on kingeccksiastica written by Bishop Haito to clergy in his diocese between 807 and 823 gives the full list of liturgical books which every priest had to have: "sacramentum, lectionarius, antifonarius, baptisterium, compotas, canon penitentialis, psalterium, homeliae per circulum anni dominicis diebus et singulis festivitatibus," Capitularía regum Francorum, vol. 1, ed. Alfred Boretius, MGH, Legum Sectio II (Hanover: Hahn, 1883), p. 363. It is noticeable that practical liturgical books such as a lectionary or antiphonary never had royal imagery in the Carolingian period. 43 Lawrence Nees. "Problems of Form and Function in Early Medieval Illustrated Bibles from Northwest Europe," in Imaging the Early Medieval Bible, ed. John Williams (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania University, 1999), pp. 122-77, demonstrates this in regard to Carolingian bibles. 44 So, for example, the initial page of the Gospel of Luke in the Gospelbook produced in St. Martin of Tours in the years 840-843 has the titulus "Iura sacerdotii Lucas tenet ore tuvenci' over the symbol of Luke, see Wolfenbiitteler Cimelien: Das Evangeliar Heinrichs des Löwen in der Herzog August Bibliothek, ed. Peter Ganz et al. (Weinheim: Acta Humaniora, 1989), pp. 52-7. Another example is the Gospels of Lothar produced at St. Martin of Tours at the middle of the ninth century; some of its initial pages and canon tables are embellished with the depictions of the cruciform monograms of Christ reminiscent of contemporary Byzantine seals invoking Christ. See, for instance, Wilhelm Koehler, Die karolingischen Miniaturen, vol. 1, Die Schule von Tours, pt. 2 (Berlin: Deutscher Verein fur Kunstwissenschaft, 1933), tab. 103b and 104b. Thus, the Gospels were "sealed" with the monogram of Christ, the primary lord of clergy, similar to royal charters confirmed with ruler's monograms.

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ship. The question is whether this visual discourse was coherent and can be summarized in a political concept or not. Dominique Alibert, following the traditional approach to rulers' imagery, argues that this was the case and that most examples (table 1, #2—4 and #7-9) represent the royal image in majesty. 45 He argues that this image is close to contemporary imagery of David and Christ in majesty and, therefore, represents "intermediary majesty" (majesté intermédiaire) ,46 The position of the Carolingian king is different from that of the prophets of the Old Testament, because chronologically they are divided by the redemptive passions of Christ. Consequently, the Carolingian king is neither priest, nor prophet; he is an intermediary between God and his people. He is a sacred personage and the mediator of transcendence. Alibert's hypothesis may explain why the royal imagery was brought into mid-ninth-century religious manuscripts: the Carolingian king as a sacred personage took a place along with other sacred personages such as the evangelists or Jerome. Yet not all surviving images of Carolingian rulers depicted in the 840-870s support his hypothesis. The image of Lothar I in the Psalter produced at his Court School soon after 842 (table 1, #1) clearly contradicts this theory and was left out of consideration by Alibert. The fact that the Psalter was owned by the daughter of Lothar I after his death indicates that, from the very beginning, it was produced for Lothar's family, and the dedicatory image of the emperor might, therefore, reflect the vision of royal authority at his court. This miniature certainly does not represent a sacred personage. The comparison with the image of David on the next folio (fol. 5r) demonstrates the sharp distinction between the Old Testament king and Lothar: the former bears the features of a spiritual leader, while the latter is the embodiment of secular military power. David is shown as a musician playing a lute. Lothar, on the other hand, holds a scepter and a sword. The "spiritual vs. lay" dichotomy is also expressed through other differences between the two images: Lothar wears a crown, while David is crowned with a halo; Lothar sits on a secular sella curulis, and David on a throne usually employed in the imagery of sacred personages. 47 The difference is augmented by Lothar's short cloak resembling the paludamentum. Thus, Lothar's image still uses the elements of Roman imperial imagery such as a scepter, the paludamentum, and the sella curulis, alongside such an undoubtedly Frankish attribute as the sword.

Dominique Alibert, "La majesté sacrée du roi: images du souverain carolingien," Histoire de l'art 5.6 (1989): pp. 23-36. 46 Ibid, p. 30. 47 Thomas F. Mathews, The Clash of the Gods: A Reinterpretation of Early Christian Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 104-7 points out the important iconographie difference between the secular sella curulis and the divine throne in Late Antiquity. 45

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The dedicatory poems accompanying both images express the same dichotomy between a lay military leader and a religious spiritual one. The poem dedicated to Lothar resembles a Roman panegyric and glorifies his imperial triumph known to other peoples of the orbis terrarum, so that they poscant foedera pads and tremescunt sua iura (table 1, #1). The poem neither mentions God, nor makes any religious remark. On the other hand, the second poem, dedicated to David, has a completely different tonality and describes the divinely chosen king, whose celestial psalms professed the birth of Christ the King. 48 Thus, the dedicatory miniature of Lothar presents a triumphal imago following mainly a Roman imperial pattern. Lothar is shown in imperial majesty, but it is very different from the "intermediary majesty" proposed by Alibert. Another image of a Carolingian monarch, which might represent Lothar I or/and Louis the German, in the Martyrologium of Wandalbert of Priim (ca. 850) is considered by Alibert as an example of royal majesty (table 1, #4). This image of a Carolingian was produced in a monastic atelier, Reichenau or St. Gall, and differs in structure and function from the previous one. The ruler sits on a sella curulis, with the gesture of meditation and hesitation familiar to a monastic painter, and only a crown and scepter indicate his imperial status. The unidentified monarch is not the focus of the visual composition; at the center is a book, the Martyrologium of Wandalbert, presented to the ruler by a monk. The titulus over the miniature confirms this visual impression: "Oh, mundane king, clement and senior ruler, kindly accept small gifts brought by an honored servant." This image is very different from the one drawn at Lothar's Court School; this reflects not only the different places of their production—the imperial court as opposed to a monastery—but also their different functions. While the first image reminds of an imperial triumph, the monastic miniature depicts the presentation of a gift to a Carolingian and constantly reminded him of expected remuneration. The book was the object connecting the ruler and the monastic community, and the dedicatory miniature at the beginning of the manuscript visualized this connection. 49 Only the depiction of Lothar I in the gospelbook produced at St. Martin of Tours (table 1, #3) fits the pattern of royal majesty delineated by Alibert. But what was the function of the dedicatory miniature, commissioned by the emperor in the monastery located on the territory of his younger Verse in Miniaturenhandschriften, in MGH, Poetae Latini aevi Carolini, vol. 6, pt. 1, ed. Karl Strecker (Weimar: Böhlau, 1951), p. 164. 49 According to Wollasch, "Kaiser und Könige als Brüder der Mönche," pp. 8-9, the image of the ruler was brought in the martyrologium because of his fraternal relationship with the monastic community presenting a particular codex. 48

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b r o t h e r , Charles the Bald, f o r the use at the place o f p r o d u c t i o n ?

The

depicted L o t h a r points his l e f t h a n d at the dedicatory p o e m o n f o l i o 2 r facing the image; the final lines o f this p o e m a n s w e r the question: The king is depicted on this page so that whoever might some time see here the face of Augustus suppliant will say, "praise to all-powerful God. Lothar deserves to have perennial rest through our Lord Jesus Christ, w h o reigns everywhere." 50 T h e p o e m also describes the specific relationship established b e t w e e n the e m p e r o r and the m o n a s t i c c o m m u n i t y : b y c o m m i s s i o n i n g the b o o k and presenting it to the m o n a s t e r y , L o t h a r b e c a m e its lay b r o t h e r . In return, the c o m m u n i t y w a s to pray f o r him and his family. 5 1 Because the g o s p e l b o o k w a s c o m m i s s i o n e d f o r the internal use o f St. Martin, the last lines o f the p o e m w e r e addressed to its m o n k s , w h o w o u l d read the gospel. Thus, the miniature did n o t simply represent royal majesty o r send a particular message b u t had a practical m n e m o n i c f u n c t i o n reminding to the v i e w e r o f his obligation to pray to G o d o n b e h a l f o f L o t h a r . 5 2 T h e First Bible o f Charles the Bald presents a n o t h e r ruler's image p r o d u c e d at the same monastic atelier in the 8 4 0 s (table 1, # 2 ) . 5 3 This image John Lowden, "The Royal/Imperial Book and the Image or Self-image of the Medieval Ruler," in Kings and Kingship in Medieval Europe, ed. Anne J. Duggan, King's College London Medieval Studies, no. 10 (London: King's College London, Centre for Late Antique and Medieval Studies, 1993), p. 222. The translation is that of William J. Deshman, Word and Image: An Introduction to Early Medieval Art (Boulder: Westview, 2000), pp. 135-6. 51 Thus, the message of this image and accompanying poem complies with Wollasch's explanation of the royal imagery in liturgical manuscripts. He used this image, indeed, as the main evidence supporting his theory; see Wollasch, "Kaiser und Könige als Brüder der Mönche," p. 19. Yet, not all Carolingian royal images found in religious manuscripts support this argument. 52 William J. Deshman, Word and Image, p. 136 underlines this function of the miniature: "The picture is meant to function as a mnemonic device, summing up and recalling for us the monks' desire that we, the viewers of this miniature, pray for Lothar. The image is a spur to devotion, and it reminds the viewer why the manuscript was made, functions far removed indeed from Gregory's conception of pictures as the books of the illiterate." On the miniature, the ruler's left hand is raised, while the forefinger is pointing to the left. This gesture later became the one of authority, and it had, no doubt, the same meaning here. For gestures of authority depicted on miniatures from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, see François Gamier, he langage de l'image au moyen âge, vol. 1, Signification et la symbolique (Paris: Le Léopard d'Or, 1982), pp. 188-9. Therefore, the depicted Lothar not only reminds the viewers but also orders them to pray on his behalf. 53 For the best analysis of the image and the accompanying poem, see Koehler, Die karolingischen Miniaturen, vol. 1, pt. 2, pp. 60—4 and Paul E. Dutton and Herbert L. Kessler, The Poetjy and Paintings of the First Bible of Charles the Bald (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), pp. 71-87. 50

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uses the symbols of authority found in the Gospels of Lothar. Yet the whole composition shows evident changes. Charles the Bald sits in front of the monks of St. Martin; three of them presenting him with the Bible, while the other eight monks do not look at the king but are engaged in a liturgical action. The second difference is the hand of God at the top of the composition; from it, rays radiate down in the direction of the king indicating the grace of God. The king and the hand of God are separated by a curtain. What do these symbols mean? Similar to Alibert, Paul Dutton and Herbert Kessler argue that "the radiating manus dei above the king's head, surmounted by stars and separated by a curtain symbolizing heaven, signified Charles's status as God's intermediary on earth."54 A second interpretation is, however, more likely: the presence of two liturgical chalices and two hangers on which two female figures are placing votive crowns, attributes characteristic of a church interior, together with the hand of God in the space limited by the curtain all indicate rather a liturgical space, and the curtain, therefore, might represent that of a ciborium. The entire message of the upper and lower registers of the miniature, then, underlines the liturgical role of the monks in maintaining royal authority; the grace of God is mediated through the mystery of liturgy, as shown at the top of the miniature, and the monks perform this liturgy at the bottom. Thus, the miniature presents two different spaces at the same time: the secular space dominated by the king and the liturgical space dominated by the monks. The liturgical motive is reinforced in the final lines of the dedicatory poem facing the image, which underlines the crucial liturgical function of the monks for the well-being of the king and his family. What praises, what thanks, what songs, O David, 55 Will [this] sweet tune, sweet voice, lyre, and strings sing for you? Since we pray specially in psalms and in masses. We shall devoudy sing psalms for you, [your] wife, [and your] child. In this way those of us who will come afterwards Will bring forth constant and bountiful prayers [for you]. May there be hope, virtue, light, victory, Christ, Peace, and praise for you without end, good King David. Be well!56

Besides the fact that the two royal miniatures produced at Tours in the 840s communicate messages different from previous royal imagery, they also used different visual semantics. There is no military symbol of authority; both 54

Dutton and Kessler, The Poetry and Paintings, p. 71. It would lead too far to analyse in detail how the Davidic motive which was so ubiquitous in Carolingian political thought was used in this Bible; see, however, Steger, David rex et propheta, pp. 8-23 and Herbert L. Kessler, The Illustrated'biblesfrom Tours, Studies in Manuscript Illumination, no 7 (Princeton: Princeton University, 1977), pp. 105-10. 56 The translation is that of Paul Dutton in Dutton and Kessler, The Poetry and Paintings, p. 121. 55

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rulers sit on a throne wearing a full-length red mantle which has no connection to the Roman paludamentum but looks rather like a chlamys, the core element of imperial state costume in contemporary Byzantium.57 The image of power is created by new symbols—a crown and a throne. These innovations reflect the fact that the image of royal authority accentuating military might and employing Roman or Frankish traditions was no longer relevant to the monastic community of St. Martin of Tours. It was replaced by a new image pointing at the spiritual power of the rulers and unifying visual attributes developed in Christian and contemporary Byzantine iconographic traditions. This spiritual character of royal power is emphasized in the lastmentioned miniature by depicting the hand of God above the head of Charles the Bald. It is, indeed, no more than a visual translation of the formula gratia Dei rex emerging in the intitulatio of Charles the Bald in the same decade. At the same time, it is not simply a translation, but rather an active interpretation of the formula, one connecting the grace of God to the liturgical performance of clergy. This interpretation reflected and reinforced the increased status of clergy and their shepherds—archbishops, bishops, and abbots. The miniatures in liturgical manuscripts produced at Tours at the same time mirror this change. One of these is the gospel book executed in St Martin of Tours in 840-843, which has a small medallion-depiction of two clerics, painted with shiny golden ink, on the otherwise traditional initial page introducing the Gospel of Mathew (ill. I). 58 A half-bent priest (with the inscription sacerdos over his head) presents a book to an archbishop (marked with the word archiepiscopus) holding a crosier and sitting on a chair resembling the sella curulis. The most important feature of the medallion is that both figures have a halo, equating two abstract representatives of clergy with saintly personages. 59 57

The chlamys was a symbol of anointed and elected power, and it was given "to the emperor at the time of his coronation. This robe symbolised the divine power, the authority to rule the world and the right to be worshipped," George P. Galavaris, "The Symbolism on the Imperial Costume as Displayed on Byzantine Coins," Museum Notes 8 (1958): pp. 102-3 and 109-10. 58 Wolfenbiittel, Herzog August Bibliothek, Cod. Guelf. 16. Aug. 2°, fol. 5r. 59 Another example is a miniature from the Sacramentary of Marmoutier, produced at Tours in 844-845 for Rainaud, abbot of Marmoutier (Autun, Bibliotheque Municipale, Ms. 19 bis, fol. 173v: See also Wilhelmina C. M. Wiistefeld, "Catalogue," in The Utrecht Psalter in Medieval Art, pp. 220-1). It presents the abbot, marked with the inscription 'Raganaldus abba, reading benedictions to people. His status is expressed through a staff and halo, and double the size of the people submissively bending in front of him; monks, whose status is expressed by halos, are in the upper two rows, while the laity without halos are in the bottom row. The use of a halo to distinguish the clerics is consistent in this sacramentary. The introductory miniature on fol. l v presents clerics of different ranks, and all the clerics from a bishop to a doorkeeper have golden or scarlet halos. For details on this miniature, see Roger R. Reynolds,

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Through the First Bible of Charles the Bald, the new interpretation of royal imagery that emerged in Tours in the 840s and early 850s became known at his court and in his Court School (active between about 855 and 877).60 Yet it did not immediately affect the image of authority there. The Prayerbook of Charles the Bald (table 1, #5) was produced at his court school between 855 and 869, when the First Bible of Charles the Bald was already at the court, but the ruler's image in the prayerbook did not follow the Turonian model. Charles the Bald is seen in proskynesis in front of crucified Christ, and the only sign indicating the royal status of the praying king is his diadem. 61 The scene is accompanied by the following titulus-. O Christ, you who on the cross have absolved the sins of the world, absolve, I pray, all [my] wounds for me.62 The prayerbook was composed by a cleric or a group of clerics at the court as a personal liturgical manual for Charles the Bald. Suppliant recommendations of the composer addressed to the king are discernible in some tides of the collection such as Oratio quando offertis ad missam pro propriis peccatis, et pro animabus amicorum or Horn prima sic orabitisP The prayerbook contains a personal prayer that Charles the Bald had to say before a litany; in the prayer the text switches from the second person plural, used by the composer to address the king, to the first person singular used by the king to address God in private. 64 The depiction of the king and crucified Christ

"The Portrait of the Ecclesiastical Officers in the Kaganaldus Sacramentary and Its LiturgicoCanonical Significance," Speculum 46 (1971): pp. 432-42. Around this miniature, there are four medallions with the figures of the four cardinal virtues, at that time frequently associated with lay rulers, namely, Prudentia, Fortitudo, Iustitia, and Temperantia. Thus, these miniatures demonstrate the clerical perception of their spiritual superiority over the laity and the increased status of their leaders, whose authority was expressed by means of visual attributes used in royal iconography. 60 O n the Court School of Charles the Bald and the problem of its localization, see Koehler and Mütherich, Die karolingischen Miniaturen, vol. 5 (Berlin: Deutscher Verein für Kunstwissenschaft, 1992), pp. 9-16, 67-71 and Rosamond McKitterick, "The Palace School of Charles the Bald," in Charles the Bald: Court and Kingdom, ed. Margaret Gibson et al. (Oxford: B.A.R., 1981), pp. 385^*00. 61 For the analysis of the image and its hypothetical Byzantine prototype, see Robert Deshman, "The Exalted Servant: The Ruler Theology of the Prayerbook of Charles the Bald," Viator 11 (1980): pp. 385-400. Wollasch, "Kaiser und Könige als Brüder der Mönche," pp. 15-6, underlines that the prayers and psalms of the prayerbook have a monastic origin. 62 Translation by Deshman, "The Exalted Servant," pp. 390-1. 63 Uber precationum quas Carolus Calvus imperator Hludoviä Pii Caesarisfiliuset Caroli Magni nepos, sibi adolescenti pro quotidiano usu, ante annos viginti quinque supra septingentos in unum collegi, et Uteris scribi aureis mandavit, ed. Guilhelm, 2nd ed. (Ingolstadt: David Sartorius, 1585), pp. 158 and 173. 64 Ibid., pp. 134-5.

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precedes the Oratio ad orandum sanctam crucem,65 and it might have been a visual recommendation to Charles the Bald how to conduct this prayer, which is evidently marked out among other prayers. 66 Thus, the prayerbook presents neither the royal image in majesty nor the self-representation of the king. Instead, it is addressed to the king as a visual manual for the adoration of the cross in the liturgy of Good Friday as well as an orthodox statement on Crucifixion against Gottschalk's heresy. As a personal manual of Charles the Bald, it was not intended initially to be seen by other people. That is why probably the image does not bear traditional royal insignia, although such insignia can be found in another manuscript produced for the king at the same school and in the same period, namely, the Psalter of Charles the Bald (table 1, #8). Charles the Bald is depicted at the beginning of the manuscript between the images of David and Jerome. This royal depiction can no doubt be called the image in majesty, which is created by means of imperial attributes derived from late imperial Rome and contemporary Byzantium, that is, a short scepter instead of a more traditional Frankish staff, a chlamys instead of a p a l u d a m e n t u m or sagum venetum, 67 an imperial throne instead of a sella curulis or faldistorium, a fastigium, and a purple orb with a golden cross. The latter is treated not as a real spherical object, but rather as a visual sign copied from an imperial prototype. The use of imperial attributes matches the titulus that proclaims Charles the Bald similar to the Old Testament's Josiah and equal to Emperor Theodosius. All these features indicate that the miniature represents not a real but an ideal royal image reflecting the perception of royal authority at the court of Charles the Bald and probably the king's own understanding of his role. Unlike the previous prayerbook which arranges psalms, prayers, and the readings from the Gospels by feasts and certain occasions, the Psalter of Charles the Bald presents a traditional Carolingian text of the Psalter together with the accompanying Cantica. The only feature connecting the manuscript to Charles the Bald is a litany similar to the one in his prayerbook and referring to him and his wife Irmintrude. 68 It is less convenient as an everyday devotional

Ibid., pp. 171-2. This prayer was performed on Good Friday. "In the Carolingian period one of the most important features of this Good Friday ceremony of the adoration of the cross was the prostration of the clergy and the faithful before the cross on the altar, and the image in the prayerbook refers to this ritual proskynesis on Good Friday," Deshman, "The Exalted Servant," p. 389. 67 For details on the importance of the fastigum among imperial attributes and its introduction into Carolingian iconography and discourse see Ildar H. Garipzanov, "Fastigium as an Element of the Carolingian Image of Authority: The Transformation of the Roman Imperial Symbol in the Early Middle Ages," Majestas 10 (2002): pp. 5-26. 68 Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, ms. lat. 1152, fol. 170r-172v. 65 66

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book. Most likely, it was produced for the library or treasury of the king; it could, for instance, have been placed in the royal chapel open on the front pages with the images of Charles the Bald and Jerome facing each other. Finally, splendid manuscripts such as the Psalter of Charles the Bald were common currency in the gift-exchange relations. Therefore, the real possibilities of being used as gift and being viewed by the members of Carolingian elite might have affected the iconographical program of the codex from the very beginning. This might explain why the royal image in the discussed manuscript is so close to the public image of Charles the Bald after his imperial coronation, which openly turned from Frankish royal attributes to Byzantine imperial ones. 69 The use of the hand of God in the Psalter of Charles the Bald recalls the Turonian tradition, but there is a significant difference: there is no separating line between the hand of God and the king. The grace of God directly descends onto the head of Charles the Bald, and the hand of God appears from the highest point of the fastigium, which symbolizes royal authority. Thus, the whole composition makes the hand of God another royal insignia, 70 and connects the grace of God directly to the royal office without an intermediary role for the clergy. This means that the iconographical element first developed at Tours was adapted at the Court School of Charles the Bald as a visual attribute of royal authority to convey a very different message. The grace of God, its relation to royal office, and the crucial question, who is in control of this grace, were the main contemporary matters that produced different interpretations. The imagery of the Court School, presenting an "official" royal self-portrait, was involved in this discourse and, as such, might be called, to a certain extent, royal propaganda.

65 "Nam talari dalmatica [dalmatic—a garment reaching to the ankles, later used by bishops as a religious dress—I. G.] indutus et baltheo desuper accinctus pendente usque ad pedes necnon capite involuto serico velamine ac diademate desuper inposito dominicis festisque diebus ad aeclesiam procedere solebat. Omnern enim consuetudinem regum Francorum contemnens Graecas [i. e. Byzantine] glorias optimas arbitrabatur...." Annales Fuldenses, in Quellen %ur karolingischen Reichsgeschichte, vol. 3, ed. Reinhold Rau, Ausgewählte Quellen %ur Deutschen Geschichte des Mittelalters, vol. 7 (Darmstadt: Wiss. Buchges., 1993), p. 100. Cf., Janet L. Nelson, The Frankish World 750-900 (London: Hambledon, 1996), pp. xv—xvi. 70 R. P. Hinks, Carolingian Art: A Study of Early Medieval Painting and Sculpture in Western Europe (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962), pp. 133—4, pointed at this: "The hand of God appearing immediately over the emperor's crown gives this picture an investiturecharacter; but this is not stressed, and the hand is treated rather as if it were a member of the imperial regalia like the crown itself, the orb, and the sceptre. The architecture, with its two tiers of columns and the looped-backed curtains, would seem to be derived from a western prototype of about 400."

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The role of Charles the Bald's imagery as means of royal self-representation and propaganda is accentuated by Nicholaus Staubach.71 He considers the next three images of Charles the Bald produced in the years 869-870 the most obvious examples of royal propaganda related to contemporary events, in particular, to the coronation in Metz and to the imperial aspirations of the Carolingian king. He argues that these images developed the royal representative image as rex christianus-. a new Solomon and the embodiment of an ideal ruler.72 The first image is found in the Sacramentary of Metz, produced by the Court School of Charles the Bald around 869 and probably related to his coronation as king of Lotharingia.73 The prince, generally thought to be Charles the Bald, stands between two prelates and wears a red paludamentum with his right hand lifted up to the level of his chest and with the forefinger pointing upward at the direction of the hand of God placing a crown on his head. All three personages have golden halos that makes the king an equal spiritual partner to the standing-by clerics.74 The clerics are certainly involved in the ceremony, but God crowns Charles directly.75 This repeats the royal message already visible in the Psalter of Charles the Bald that the grace of God is direcdy connected to the royal office and that the king, thus, becomes a sacred personage spiritually equal to the clergy. The Codex Aureus of St. Emmeram, executed at the court school of Charles the Bald in 870 expressed this message even more succincdy (table 1,

Nikolaus Staubach, Das Herrscherbild Karls des Kahlen: Formen und Funktionen monarchischer 'Repräsentation im früheren Mittelalter, Phil. Diss, in Westfälischen Wilhelm-Universität z Münster, Münster, n. p., 1981 and id., Rex christianus: Hofkultur und Herrschaftspropaganda im Reich Karls des Kahlen, pt. 2, Die Grundlegung der 'religion royale,' Pictura and Poesis, no. 2 (Cologne: Böhlau, 1993). For a critical review of this approach, see Adelheid Krah, '"Rex christianus.' Das Herrscherbild Karls II: Bemerkungen zu einer Neuererscheinung," Zeitschrift für bayerische handesgeschichte 59.3 (1996): pp. 949-59; and especially Egon Boshof, "Karl der Kahle—novus Karolus magnus?" in Karl der Große und das Erbe der Kulturen: Akten des 8. Symposiums des Mediävistenverbandes, Leipzig 15.-18. Mär% 1999, ed. Franz-Reiner Erkens (Berlin: Akademie, 2001), pp. 135-52. 72 Staubach, Das Herrscherbild, p. 342. Cf. Boshof, "Karl der Kahle," pp. 147-51. 73 See Staubach, Rex christianus, pt. 2, pp. 223-34. 74 This image is faced by the depiction of Gregory the Great, and Staubach (ibid., pp. 233—4) thinks that, similar to the images of Charles the Bald and Jerome in the Psalter of Charles the Bald, the two miniatures facing each other in the Gregorian sacramentary of Metz represent the commissioner and the author of the work. The scene with the king refers, in Staubach's opinion, to the occasion when the manuscript was donated to the Metz Cathedral in 869. Krah, '"Rex christianus! Das Herrscherbild Karls II," pp. 956-8 questions this assertion and argues that this composition instead represents the dependence of Charles the Bald on the clergy. 75 The coronation of a ruler by the hand of God is an old motive known from Late Antiquity, see Marielle Hageman, "Between the Imperial and the Sacred: The Gesture of Coronation in Carolingian and Ottonian Images," in New Approaches to Medieval Communication, ed. Marco Mostert, Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy, no. 1 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1999), pp. 127-64. 71

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#7). 76 This gospelbook, possibly produced as a foundation gift, presents Charles the Bald in majesty, wearing a chlamys and a crown, and sitting on a throne under a religious jastigium, from the upper part of which the hand of God bestows divine grace onto the king. The dedicatory poem also points to the ruler's connection to the grace of God: he was born tribuente deo, and he is supported divino munere. God is his protector and sovereign. The depicted king is no longer the rex Francorum whose authority tied him to his gens or gentes. He is a ruler of lands, Francia and Gotia, who are mentioned in the poem and whose female personifications submissively stand beside the royal throne. 77 In the image Charles turns to the left and looks at the Lamb of God, indicating Christ and his passion, which is depicted on the facing page, and the accompanying verse says that Charles prays to God to give him a long life (ut tecum vivat longevus in aevum). The use of the pronoun te implies a direct address to God, who is therefore the ideal audience of the whole composition. Thus, one of the functions of this miniature is to communicate the king's devotion to God and his hope for constant divine support and protection. On the other hand, assuming that from the very beginning the magnificent gospelbook was produced as a gift to a church, the Frankish clergy must have been envisioned as another audience. For this audience, the miniature demonstrated the image in majesty of an ideal monarch, by whose imperio et auro the codex shines, who follows Salomonica iura, and who made many good things favente deo. Communicating these messages, the monarch's representation could have functioned, as Staubach argues, as a means of royal propaganda.78 The third manuscript with the image of Charles the Bald which, according to Staubach, must be also viewed as a royal propagandists selfrepresentation 79 is the Bible of San Paolo fuori le mura executed at the School of Rheims around the years 870—871 (table 1, #9). It shares most signs of rulership such as a chlamys, crown, throne, and orb with the Codex Aureus. At the same time, it has three significant differences: first, it lacks the hand of God; second, it employs the imperial fastigium instead of the religious jastigium seen in the Codex Aureus-, and finally, it presents the four cardinal virtues, which an ideal ruler was advised to follow. The dedicatory poem stresses the importance of these virtues, which the ruler has to exhibit in order to be adequate to his office:

The best facsimile edition is by Georg Leidinger, ed., Der Codex Aureus der bayerischen Staatsbibliothek in München: Faksimile Ausgabe, 6 vols. (Munich: Schmidt, 1921-1923). For the detailed description of the image and related historiography, see Staubach, Rex christianus, pt. 2, pp. 261-9. 77 This was already noticed by Schramm, Die deutschen Kaiser, p. 54. 78 Staubach, Rex christianus, pt. 2, p. 281. 79 Ibid., p. 253. 16

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The Lord, King of Heaven, overflowing with his wonted love, Has cherished this Charles, his master's king on earth; Therefore, that he might be equal to this great office, He has filled him with the fourfold sustenance of the four virtues; Here they bend over his head, pouring all things down from on high So that with prudence, justice, moderation, and strength, He righdy governs first himself, and then all else. He is sheltered on right and left by sacred protection of the angels So that he may rejoice in peace, all his enemies are conquered.. .80 Thus, the ruler on this miniature is deprived of all spiritual signs of rulership. Where the poem in the Codex Aureus describes the arms of Christ protecting the king, 81 the poem in the Bible of San Paolo fuori le mura mentions only angels protecting him. Although the introductory poem on fol. 2v—3r (table 1, #9) mentions Charles the Bald as a commissioner of the book produced as a votive offer to Christ—God, therefore, is indicated as its ideal audience—the image of the king together with the accompanying poem rather expresses instead the ideas of the powerful archbishop of Rheims, Hincmar, who may have had a direct hand in the work, and may have been sending a message to Charles the Bald. In 869, Charles the Bald donated his first Bible, which had a monitory message of the monastic community of St. Martin of Tours, to the Metz Cathedral. The next Bible, the book of divine law which a Christian ruler was expected to have, sent him another clerical message reminding him of the duty to govern himself with the help of the four virtues and his obligation to defend the Christian church. Thus, the royal images discussed above fulfilled, first and foremost, a communicative function, but they addressed different audiences and carried different messages. Therefore, it is impossible to categorize them only as means of royal self-representation and propaganda or the visualization of the so-called "contemporary concept of rulership." This imagery provided the visual dialogue on royal authority among different authors, and their messages thus represented the multiplicity of opinions on this issue. Consequently, different places of production such as a court or a monastery visibly affected the image of authority presented in the manuscripts. Although they often Translation in Joachim Gaehde and Florentine Mütherich, "Carolingian Manuscript Illumination in Rheims," in The Utrecht Psalter in Medieval Art, p. 114. 81 Lines 13-14 of the dedicatory poem assert that by the arms of Christ Charles is defended "semper ab hoste suus" (table 1, #7). Further in the codex this expression is repeated near the depiction of the hand of God on fol. 97v at the beginning of the Gospel of John. Leidinger, ed. Der Codex Aureus, p. 4: tab. 194; Bibtiothecarum etpsalterium versus, in MGH, Poetae Latini aevi Carolini, vol. 3, ed. Ludwig Traube (Berlin: Weidmann, 1896), p. 254: Dextera haecpatris mundum dicione gubemans Protegat et Karolum semper ab hoste suum. 80

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shared similar visual attributes such as the hand of God, a fastigium, a crown, or a throne, these attributes experienced different visual interpretations and consequendy carried different messages. Therefore, to reduce this iconographic multiplicity to the notion of royal propaganda—this approach is strongly influenced by late medieval and early modern historiography on the imagery of the absolute monarchs—is an obvious simplification. The exchange of precious religious manuscripts carrying different images of authority provided constant visual dialogue among the royal court, the key monasteries such as St. Martin of Tours, and some influential Frankish bishops such as Hincmar of Rheims. The surviving manuscripts demonstrate that this dialogue was most active in the kingdom of Charles the Bald. This indicated the growing significance of the clergy for his politics, and the need to describe royal authority in relation to God and the clergy not only verbally but also visually. As this tendency developed, the earlier dichotomy of lay-military versus religious-spiritual authority disappeared. All sides involved in the dialogue viewed the king as an intrinsic part of the divinely organized universe, and, henceforth, the grace of God was considered a necessary requirement for successful rulership. * * *

To sum up, the imago auctoritatis clearly had a communicative function in the Carolingian world. As a result, the gradual changes in Carolingian authority went side by side with similar development in its visual representation. From the end of the eighth century, it occasionally used visual parallels to the image of David, as this king of the chosen people provided an excellent image of authority for Carolingian clergy and Charlemagne, the king of the Franks. Imperial aspirations and the dreams of a universal Christian empire turned the image of authority to the visual vocabulary borrowed from the late Roman empire. This led to the creation at the imperial court of Louis the Pious of the image of a victorious imperator, an earthly vicar of Christ. Later on, in the midninth century, there took place a gradual transition from the court's use of a Roman imperial tradition of representing authority to a new "medieval" system, which combined the ideal insignia of the Carolingian monarchy with Christian symbolism. The grace of God gradually became a crucial matter in royal representation. This transition was most visible in the kingdom of Charles the Bald in the 840-860s, where the manuscripts produced at his court at the end of this period mirror the conscious attempt on the part of the king and his entourage to represent him as an ideal gratia Dei rex.

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